How can we develop an IoT from a citizen’s perspective? What kind of projects have empowered citizens and what does it take to get these kind of projects of the ground? Those were the central questions we addressed at our panel at Thingscon 2017 that I had co-organized with Iskander Smit. Point of departure was to look at the design and implementation of IoT not from a technological but rather from an organizational and societal perspective.

Meta-level: citizen empowerment in frames for policy and funding schemes

First up was Jiska Engelbert from the Centre for Bold Cities, who approached the theme from the level of the frames and visions on smart cities and citizens. These frames are important as they are do not just appear as words on paper or in powerpoints at numerous smart city exhibitions staged across the world. These frames inform policy, research and funding opportunities and thus set the stage for the actual development of IoT and smart city technologies.

At these conferences, Engelbert, noted, the ‘citizen perspective’ has increasingly gained popularity. But what exactly is meant with it? Mostly, she concluded it is addressed from an economic, creative city perspective. Cities are framed as sites of opportunity, where citizens in start-ups, living labs and light-house projects contribute to finding solutions for particular problems and built business models around these. In turn, this is framed as an opportunity to make cities more competitive and attractive as sites for large tech companies. This frame often arrives at the expense of addressing social problems in cities, such as unemployment, social exclusion, debts, loneliness, etc.

Currently, finding opportunities to address these issues in research and development projects for IoT is very hard, Engelbert concludes. Most grants and policy frameworks see the city as an object that we can improve upon with technology, rather than as a social system. They also require co-investment from companies and/or results that are up-scaleable rather than address situated social problems.

So in her view, in order to come to a truly citizen centerd smart city and IoT research and development agenda, these frameworks need re-adjustment from smart to shared: Sustainable, Harmonious, Affective, Relevant, Empowering and Diverse.

Level of city infrastructure

In the next two talks we zoomed in to the level of the supporting infrastructures that cities would need to support a citizen centered IoT. Hanna Niemi-Hugaerts, the IoT Program Director at the Forum Virium Helsinki gave an overview of the projects they had undertaken. They have been active at a number of levels.

Inclusivity Forum Virium has organized numerous workshops in which citizens were invited to discuss possible futures for their city. These workshops were accessible for people without any knowledge about the technologies itself. The goal was to get the input of a broad group of citizens in the drafting up of an agenda and vision on the role of technologies in urban life.

Capacity building Next, for those who were interested in becoming more active in the actual development, Forum Virium organized workshops in which they could develop skills such as data gathering through crowdsourcing; There are many neighborhood groups that are interested in measuring air quality or traffic in their surroundings, but don’t have the actual skills yet.

Data infrafstructure In order to further open up the development process, Forum Virium has been active in developing an open source data platform that combines various data sources from numerous sources in the city

Data consent management system Finally, in order for citizens to trust IoT services and give them agency over their relation with IoT services, Forum Virium has been contributing to the development of the My data ‘consent management system’. This is an easy to understand/use application that citizens could use to interface with various IoT and Smart City Services in the city. The main principle is that citizens should always have control over their data. At the same time, this platform enables interoperability of various data between platforms.

Next-up was Peter van Waart, researcher at the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences and part of the Participatory Citymaking research-through-design project. This project addresses citymaking from an urban transition perspective.

In this vision, cities are mostly run through a ‘patchwork of regimes’. These are institutions like local governments, housing associations and the like that have established sets of rules and ways of doing and organizing.

At the same time, at the level of the everyday lifeworld of citizens, there are numerous ‘niches of novelty’. Groups of citizens or collectives who have organized themselves around particular issues like energy transition. They often have found new and innovative ways to address urban issues. However, often their ways of doing and seeing the world does not match with the ways of working of the existing patchwork of regimes.

In order to make the leap from these niches of novelty of the patchwork of regimes, new modes of organizing and new roles for professionals are needed. On the one hand, design thinking (e.g. through prototyping) could play a role at the level of bottom-up initiatives in order to start discussions around issues that are of importance to citizens.

On the other, new ways have to be found to ‘institutionalize’ the innovative approaches of these initiatives if indeed they contribute to public value creation. The Participatory Research-project has drafted a model to get a grasp of these new relations.

[side-note: we have been reflecting as well on these issues, specifically on models and roles in processes of collaborative citymaking in our own research project The Hackable City]

Balestrini sees herself as a ‘community orchestrator’, possibly one of the new roles mentioned by Van Waart that have arisen in the process of collaborative citymaking. Community Orchestrator’s help local communities to identify an issue, frame it in a particular way so it resonates with potential community members as well as with policy makers and other institutional parties and helps in the design of tools and processes that can activate a community around the issue.

She calls this the Bristol Approach, after the city where she deployed it in a project on participatory city sensing. There, through a number of workshops, interviews and analysis of data, it was found that damp housing was considered a problem by a number of citizens.

This issue was further developed in a number of framing workshops, in which participants starting to address themselves as the ‘dampbusters’, a term that provided them with a sense of common identity and purpose.

To gather data about the issue, in a series of workshops a specific sensing tool was fabricated. It consisted of a technical sensor, but also of a model of cute looking frog that could be easily fabricated through 3d printing technologies, and that could house the sensor. Balestrini stressed that this ‘affective’ approach was important, as it helped people to relate more intimately with the technology and adapt it in their everyday lives. The photogenic image of the frog-sensor also was helpful in gabbing attention from mainstream media attention for the issue of damp housing.

In the Making Sense project Balestrini and her co-researchers followed a similar approach at the Placa del Sol in Barcelona. Here noise was considered a huge problem by the residents around the square, as crowds of people hang out at the square at night, drinking and having a good time. Again, here residents were involved through a number of workshops to discuss the issue and develop collaborative sensing technologies to measure the levels of noise that kept them awake late at night.

Here, the issue was reframed as a health issue, rather than just one of discomfort. Scientific research has shown that exposure to high levels of noise can lead to various health problems. It was this particular framing that made it easier to get access to policy makers and engage in discussions about the issue. In the end, thanks to this project, measures were taken to make the square less attractive to drinking crowds.

What the examples Balestrini brought in show is that IoT technologies can play a role in the empowerment of citizens around particular issues. In these examples this worked out well thanks to the role of community orchestrator. This role consists of organizing the community to identify relevant issues, frame it in ways to make sense to the community itself as well as institutions that need to be engaged to solve the problem, and help designing affective and engaging technologies and processes of sharing and communicating in which the community can be activated.

In that way the community-orchestrator could take up some of the roles that Van Waart en Niemi-Hugaerts discussed. It is likely that this could only get of the ground in a semi-institutionalized way of working, where organizations like Forum Virium, applied research groups at Universities or independent ‘urban curators’ like Balestrini can find the means to set up the city-level frameworks as well as play a role in orchestrating the individual projects. In turn, to get this of the ground, as Engelbert argued, institutional metaframeworks for Iot and Smart Cities are needed that recognize the need to address social issues through collaborative and participatory projects that are not about developing business models and scalability, but about the creation of public values.

Abstract

Can computer hacking have positive parallels in the shaping of the built environment? The Hackable City research project was set up with this question in mind, to investigate the potential of digital platforms to open up the citymaking process. Its cofounders Martijn de Waal, Michiel de Lange and Matthijs Bouw here outline the tendencies that their studies of collaborative urban development initiatives around the world have revealed, and ask whether knowledge sharing and incremental change might be a better way forward than top-down masterplans.

During the conference, experts from Poland and abroad will discuss a number of topics, including: (a) how to combine traditional methods of cultural research with the analysis of large data sets from the web, primarily from social media; (b) how cultural events (official and grassroots) impact on the city’s development; (c) how social media form a networked public sphere, influencing urban culture through various forms of involvement and participation, (d) how to work with data in an interdisciplinary team while retaining openness and using rapid prototyping tools, (e) how and what tools to use for data analysis and visualisation in order to study and present complex areas such as the cultural life of the city.

About Medialab Katowice:

Medialab Katowice is an experimental project combining creative, research and education activities. Participants of interdisciplinary projects placing themselves at the intersection of art, design and technology use digital media to research the city and create new narratives for Katowice. Medialab is a forum for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, meeting inspiring artists and designers, as well as a collaboration platform for artists and institutions from different countries: universities, NGOs and creative-sector companies. The project involves workshops, interventions in public space, exhibitions, lectures and discussions. There are also several workgroups focused on areas of city data visualisation, spatial analysis (MapLab), open data and the Arduino platform.

Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth): Civic technology, social innovation and the reshaping of smart cities

]]>Video “A Walk in the smart city” (wandeling in de slimme stad) Betweterfestival 29 Sept. 2017http://themobilecity.nl/2017/11/24/video-available-of-talk-a-walk-in-the-smart-city-een-wandeling-in-de-slimme-stad-betweterfestival-29-sept-2017/
Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:48:00 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4955Recently I gave a talk (in Dutch) for the Betweterfestival in Tivoli/Vredenburg Utrecht about the increasingly dominant role of data in the ‘smart city’. The talk was called “A Walk in the smart city” (Een wandeling in de slimme stad). The talk was in Dutch.

]]>[urban interfaces] graduate seminar series 2017-2018http://themobilecity.nl/2017/11/24/urban-interfaces-graduate-seminar-series-2017-2018/
Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:43:51 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4950Together with Nanna Verhoeff, Sigrid Merx, and Hira Sheikh, I am organizing this seminar series about Urban Friction. It is part of the research group [urban interfaces] I co-founded with Nanna & Sigrid.

[urban interfaces] graduate seminar 2017-2018Flyer

Urban processes have been impacted by frictions all throughout history. The remarkable pace and dynamics of the current phase of global urbanization in the age of mediatization, datafication, and pervasive connectivity suggest a new age where insular, political boundaries have come to shift radically. Perhaps to a larger extent than before, people are identifying as global citizens. However, as a result of this spatial accumulation social, political and cultural frictions within our cities manifest themselves on a wide scale. In this year’s [urban interfaces] graduate seminar series we open up a forum to debate and inquire about contemporary frictions being experienced in urban cities, namely:

Civic Empowerment and “Right to the City”
Mobility and Migration
Urban Institutions and Smart Platforms

We intend to question these frictions from a critical, yet optimistic perspective. Frictions can be both obstructive and productive and, and we aim to disclose this paradox and approach frictions as a prospect to discuss their positive potential for urban culture and society. This seminar series proposes a framework to think about urban frictions, and about how urban media, art and performance as interventions in our cities’ public spaces can productively address these frictions. In each session, we will focus on the temporality and performativity of media, art and performance, and the ambitions of the design of “frictional” urban interfaces as a form of critical making.

This seminar is designed around shared reading, discussions, and also some hands-on experimentation during a two-day “pressure cooker workshop.” Here you find the reading list with materials about urban frictions, issues of participatory city-making, and urban interventions. The program for the workshop on February 27-28 2018 will follow.

Through these readings we will introduce and discuss some fundamental theoretical questions that have formed and challenged urban frictions through the three central frameworks of the seminar: 1) frictions in participatory culture, 2) urban publicness and civic city-making, and 3) urban interventions and the critical making of urban interfaces.

]]>Article (in Dutch) in AGORA Magazine “Slimme stad, slimme stedelingen”http://themobilecity.nl/2017/11/24/article-in-dutch-in-agora-magazine-slimme-stad-slimme-stedelingen/
Fri, 24 Nov 2017 10:37:32 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4944Recently I wrote a contribution (in Dutch) for the Agora Magazine special issue about smart cities. In the essay I suggest three alternative imaginaries for smart and social cities: data city, playful city, and maker city. All of these imaginaries have hackability as a central quality.

]]>Moderation conference “A City as Smart as its Citizens”, 24 Oct. 2017, Dutch Design Week/World Design Eventhttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/11/24/moderation-conference-a-city-as-smart-as-its-citizens-24-oct-2017-dutch-design-week-world-design-event/
Fri, 24 Nov 2017 09:52:06 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4962On 24 Oct. 2017, I was the moderator of the conference “A City as Smart as its Citizens”, organized by Het Nieuwe Instituut. The event took place as part of the Dutch Design Week/World Design Event in the former Philips NatLab in Eindhoven.

How do we go beyond the “smart city” and build a smart society? The DATAstudio has spent three years studying how citizens and neighbourhoods can benefit from data and technology. The international conference Finale: A City as Smart as Its Citizens will present the project’s findings and results in the Dutch and international contexts. Speakers will include Drew Hemment (FutureEverything), Maya Indira Ganesh (Tactical Technology Collective) and Usman Haque (Umbrellium).

We will also challenge city officials, designers, data specialists, students, researchers and citizens to work together in smaller groups in design sessions. We’ll address two pertinent questions at the conference. First, how can data flows in public space be made more visible and legible so they can become the subject of public discussion and public applications? Second, how can citizens get more input and influence with regard to issues in the city that concern them through access to relevant (and legible and usable) data?

In a concluding talk and discussion, we’ll attempt to sketch a realistic yet ambitious picture of how we might move forward toward a smart society.

]]>Games for Cities Conferencehttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/07/19/games-for-cities-conference/
Wed, 19 Jul 2017 14:46:19 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4929City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and in the Games for Cities project researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues. The project consisted of three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, citizenship, inclusion respectively). In each city there was a talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. With these experiences in city gaming charted, the Games for Cities project would conclude with The Games for Cities Conference, a two day event in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam with keynotes, discussions, and games. Lots of games.

The central question of this conference was what the most important pitfalls in existing attitudes towards games used to address urban issues are and how should these be dealt with in the future? During the Games for Cities project several events were organized to explore and probe recurring design considerations and a common vocabulary when designing games for cities. Consisting of game jams and talk shows, these events brought together designers and stakeholders to identify assumptions and discover possibilities for games for cities in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Eindhoven. With the insights gathered from these meetings outlined elsewhere, the project required a final challenge: the corroboration. The gathered design insights, the games, the lessons, and the pitfalls would have to be confronted with the wisdom of bountiful experts and practitioners. As a final event a two-day conference was held at Het Nieuwe Instituut on the April 20th and 21st.

Organized by Play the City and partners in close collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut, this conference, hosted by Michiel de Lange, aimed at bringing Dutch city-gaming practices and international best practices into closer contact with one another. Four keynote speakers, Paolo Pedercini, Eric Gordon,Felix Madrazo, and Alfredo Brillembourg would reflect on certain key considerations of games for cities as well as central aspects of the urban uptake of such games. Several round table discussions with experts and practitioners would address the themes of circularity, inclusiveness and citizenship explored by Games for Cities and participants were invited to play a collection of games for cities during breakout sessions.

At the end of the conference Martijn de Waal summarised and reflected upon how the key notes, discussions and games foregrounded several general reflections that adequately chart, color, and delimit the playing field of games for cities. Paired with the insights gathered from the earlier events this report will set out to outline a general approach to games for cities. The key insights are as follows:

Games for Cities are tools to facilitate involvement

Conflict simulation in Games for Cities is an effective way to facilitate this involvement

Transparent rules in Games for Cities help players understand how a city is desired to function

Affording player input and discussion improves the level of reflection on these functions

Games for Cities’ relation to space and the stability of the goal are formative in shaping the above capabilities.

These five insights when combined result in a general approach to games for cities. The insights reverberated through all of the keynotes so the order is irrelevant, although some authors placed more emphasis on specific points listed above. However, this report will chronicle each key speaker’s argument in chronological order while elaborating the points identified above. The arguments will be illustrated using the games from the breakout session or the earlier games for cities events (For a more general overview of the conference, see the Games for Cities website). Throughout the report findings from the earlier events will be tested against the presented arguments. So first comes a recap.

Recap and Inventory

From the earlier jams and talk shows two variables influencing games for cities can be discerned. From Amsterdam and Eindhoven came the variable of spatial specificity, which should be seen as a continuum ranging from place specific to more general. Depending on where on the continuum the game falls, different design processes will take place, some relying more on the material reality while others appeal to a more general space. Utrecht introduced the variable of instrumentality locus which was further complicated in the Eindhoven event. This variable ranges from a focus on the audience experience to pure contractor instrumentality. Both of these variables are not essential to games for cities but do help in understanding the design process, the decisions taken, and their ultimate viability. This means games for cities do not follow a unilateral pattern, but instead can develop into many directions, focusing on different actors, and fitting to a plethora of different problems.

Given these two variables a more granular understanding of games for cities can already be discerned. In the graph four different approaches can already be imagined, all linked to different kind of strengths and pragmatic uses. These heuristics can help create a common lexicon for games for cities. To see the value of such additions they have to be held against reality. What does the field say about this? That is where the Games for Cities Conference comes in.

1 Paolo Pedercini (@MdeLange)

The Subtle System of Simcity – Paolo Pedercini

The first speaker of the conference was Paolo Pedercini, founder of the radical game company Molleindustria. Kicking off the conference Pedercini took the bull by the horns by addressing one of the most influential games for games for cities: Simcity. Adapted from a level editor in 1989 by Will Wright the simulation of a complex social system such as a city became the ruling paradigm for games featuring cities that still continues today, although in different formats (De Lange 2009). From IBM’s City One to Block’hood, games for cities often rely on a simulation that somehow models the complex social system that is the city. Pedercini however argues that despite the prevalence of this format, an uncritical uptake is more detrimental than beneficial.

Simcity won several prizes for its quality of simulation, even scoring ‘Best Educational Program’ in 1989. Given this focus on simulation and even education, there is a certain reliance on realism or verisimilitude in the functioning of the Simcity system. This is exactly what Pedercini revolts against. Simulating a complex system requires a degree of simplification; based on the mental model of the designer about how the system works. This means certain aspects of a system are left out while others receive emphasis. In the words of Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum, games contain “values,” by which they mean that “societies have common … values; that technologies, including digital games, embody ethical and political values; and that those who design digital games have the power to shape players’ engagement with these values” (2014, xii). Given that some actions in Simcity result in success while others result in chaos implies that a certain value system is at work here – one that claims to be and is regarded as realistic or educational. Basically what this means is that the designers have implicitly programmed the game to reward one type of city – in this case the North American neoliberal grid structure. Building a city on a mountain with high stratification and wealth distribution will lead to success in the game, while a cultural utopia will see your coffers dry and investors evicted.

Pedercini argued that aforementioned values in games – in this case the system values or system literacy – should be more explicit in games for cities. Once this “space of all possible actions that might take place in a game” (Salen and Zimmerman 2010, 69), or the space of possibility, becomes visible, players can start to explore other possibilities, breaking the rules and appropriating them (Sicart 2014). This will ultimately result in players being more involved with the actual city system than with just the game. Highlighting the values and rules of a system will then familiarize the players with the possibilities of urban involvement instead of just pushing them into a mold that won’t hold up against the more complex reality. That’s why Pedercini argued for more transparent rules in games for cities and more attention to their system literacy in order to give players more control over the available possibilities.

Holding Pedercini’s outcry against the earlier discussed variables of spatiality and instrumentality, Pedercini seems to express a preference for the more player focused side of instrumentality. To him games for cities should not aim for a specific purpose but facilitate meaningful play, which in this case means familiarizing the player with systems through which cities are conceptualized, in order to challenge them and come up with alternatives. While this is a common heard cry (Stenros and Wærn 2011; Sicart 2014, 2016; Gordon and Walter 2016a) Pedercini’s argument adds a new dimension to the spatiality variable: the value of spatiality. While a game may be playable at every location, the system of the city is can be more or less specific – such as Simcity’s Western Capitalist system. Where on the continuum a game falls ideologically should be made explicit so that it becomes clear what kind of city or involvement a game fits and how to challenge it. Pedercini as such introduces a value characteristic to the heuristics, building on giving the player insight. This trend was continued by the second speaker, Eric Gordon.

2 Eric Gordon (@Diegopajarito)

Meaningful Inefficiencies – Eric Gordon

From Pedercini’s talk came the call to contextualize the values that form the city system. Playing games for cities shouldn’t be a monolithic affair but should make the player more aware of the different positions. While agreeing on many fronts, the second keynote by Eric Gordon expanded on this with a more general critique on games for cities. Gordon, founder of the Engagement Lab and professor at Emerson College, stresses that games are autotelic – they are played for the sake of playing. Gordon followed the definition of game as presented by Bernard Suits in his book The Grasshopper:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude] (1978, 54-55).

This autotelic nature echoes Pedercini’s idea that games with city systems should not be used to force players into thinking in line with a particular city system. Gordon would continue to generalize these points by diving into ‘meaningful inefficiencies.’

By relying on the autotelic nature of games, according to Suits’ definition, Gordon characterizes games as means of inefficiency. Playing golf is fun because getting the ball in the hole is challenging, not because its efficient. Because of this inherent drive to inefficiency (or failure (Juul 2013) or uncertainty (Costikyan 2013)) Gordon questions the value of games for cities. As was also claimed during the Amsterdam talk show, games can only work as facilitators, they should not be used as quick fixes for urban issues. Such a goal oriented tool instrumentality goes against the inefficient nature of games. Gordon even went as far to claim that to improve games for cities the main task was to not use games for cities.

Gordon curbed everyone’s enthusiasm but he continued to contextualize his claims. Less games should be taken with some salt – Gordon meant less games that see the player as a good user “where the citizen is instrumental …, as if citizenship were merely acts of production and consumption” (Gordon and Walter 2016b, 4). Here Gordon echoes Pedercini in that he urges games to not blindly force one normative value on the players. Instead, Gordon goes even further than Pedercini when he completely disregards the tool aspect of the instrumentality variable. For Gordon the main part of games for cities is their facilitation of citizen involvement by relying on meaningful inefficiencies.

As the main goal is to involve citizens in neighborhood actions games should function as invitations. Inefficiencies in games act as intrinsic motivations that allow players to discover new ways of overcoming the obstacles – it invites them to play. Gordon stresses the subversion possibilities, which make inefficiencies meaningful because players appropriate them in a personal, creative way (Sicart 2014). This appropriation results in a certain degree of co-creation, which was touted as important during several talk shows. This way the players get familiarized with involvement in a safe environment and the values of the city pursued become apparent and discussed (de Lange 2015). The focus on meaningful inefficiencies as invitations to involve players was a key theme that shaped many of the other talks of the conference. Setting the general tone of designs, Gordon stressed that players and their play are more formative for games for cities than the ultimate positioning in the city as it is only an invitation tool for the citizen. How this general directive would take shape in specific designs was elucidated by the third speaker, Felix Madrazo.

3 Ego City

Ego City and Conflict Simulators – Felix Madrazo

Having had a firm impression of the actual use of games for cities and a wake-up slap regarding their transparency, the sights were now set on concrete design advices, with question like ‘how do you make circularity fun?’ and ‘what was the experience you were going for?’ during the round table discussion. Who better than Felix Madrazo from the Why Factory to give an answer to these questions.

Cities struggle with (sub)urban sprawl wherein citizens move away from the center into mono-functional, car reliant suburbs, leaving the center decrepit and out of touch, often reliant on tourism. Madrazo and his team developed a game, Ego City, that would counter this suburbanization by charting what citizens actually want in a house, something they need to flee for to get. Instead, in Ego City, the main selling point was that players could actually follow their dreams, designing a house that would fit their wildest dreams. Want one big library? Design a shape and go ahead. A rollercoaster in your house? Plot the course and go crazy! Instead of worrying about the big picture of urban supply the Ego City game allows individualism to run rampant, thus providing for everyone’s desires. The players could role play their wildest dreams – such as The Big Lebowski’s Dude house containing a bowling alley and a carpet – which gives the game a playful character according to Roger Caillois’ early play categories (2001). By minding their own business and following what they want instead of what they should get new constellations get shaped and incorporated together.

Why is this game interesting in the wider perspective of games for cities? The next step after the design is to fit everyone’s dream house into a limited space. This is where Madrazo conceptualizes games as conflict simulators. By giving every player a personal stake – their dream house – in occupying a limited space, ultimately conflicts will arise. These conflicts go against the most efficient way of building (suburbanization) and instead become a meaningful inefficiency – the space where new possibilities of using space can arise in this case. Creating a no-holds-barred landgrab opportunity different uses of space are invented and accepted, as long as dreams can be realized. During development Madrazo explored different ways of conflict, and especially when it should appear. Players could just try and build their house and only conflict if a space was double booked, but another mode made players actively conquer territory and another was algorithmically decided. Each way of dealing with conflict resulted in different player relations, forms of urgency, and, as a result, space occupation. The effect of this conflict simulation was twofold:

It added an agonistic element to the game. It also adds mimicry – or role-play – to the game. Such a conflict and role-play focus manages to make topics such as housing, circularity, and space management entertaining.

Ego City became a metaphor or tool for thinking about housing questions and conflict resolving. As meaningful inefficiency the game urges players to pursue their dreams through new innovative ways, creating a safe exploration for actual urban conflicts.

What this means for games for cities is that games, through their entertaining inefficient moments, can simulate conflicts and therewith jump start player interaction and reflection outside the game.

With the spatiality of the game being generally ubiquitous, Madrazo conversely convincingly argues for a complete audience instrumentality in design instead of a tool perspective. While the game is a tool for thinking and facilitating, it totally stems from the purpose of giving the player the experience of living out their dreams. This focus on player experience places games for cities more in a game design perspective, following several design theories (Fullerton 2014, 3; Sicart 2014). Madrazo then takes a more playful or gameful approach to games for cities, starting from the player experience or the form as a game and then sees what can be done with it. This tempering of expectations is in line with Gordon’s warning but at the same time raises questions about whether games for cities can be instrumentally designed without handing over some of its game functions such as enjoyment.

This striking approach of Madrazo to games for cities can perhaps be linked to his conception of games as conflict simulators. In his game there is a certain degree of competition – whose house gets built to the best of their dream design? This contest element is often absent in games for cities, more often opting for a co-operative or at best a co-operative asynchronous contest wherein the players together must beat ‘the system’ and can often win based on individual goals (Fullerton 2014). Most games during the breakout sessions also required an often speculative design element wherein players together come up with scenarios that explain how the future could be managed. Madrazo showed that this was also possible in fierce competition and that the game characteristics of games for cities should not be ignored in favor of a better simulation of the process, as this is, as Pedercini noted, just one possibility to explore.

4 Alfredo Brillembourg (left) (@Diegopajarito)

Games as a Census – Alfredo Brillembourg

The opposite possibility to the trend sketched by Madrazo was offered by the fourth and final keynote, Alfredo Brillembourg, artist, professor at the university of Zurich, and founder of the Urban Think Tank. Through several iterations of a game Brillembourg and his team designed a game that was very spatially specific and ultimately was more focused on a tool like use, although still useful to the players. The games his team designed have been deployed in Venezuela, South Africa, and Switzerland, exploring the possibilities of non-standardized urban densification.

Like Madrazo, Brillembourg argued that games are useful technologies to instigate conflict. Change can only be achieved through conflict which is the essence of games, according to Brillembourg. Instead of relying on games to make complicated topics such as suburbanization more enjoyable like Madrazo, Brillembourg uses games to improve the process of participatory planning. He does this by focusing the game on the process of building itself, combining bottom up processing with top down planning.

The four iterations of the game can be characterized as cooperative communication facilitators that process information about how and where to build, often with a physical model. The goal was to play with city blocks and organizing them better by building on top of other houses and more geometrically. The mechanics of the game basically revolve around resource management – what elements are in the buildings that have to be relocated and what space is available, as well as what emotional requirements need to be met. The different planning possibilities are then made and discussed by the inhabitants and the stakeholders, ultimately reaching a contract with the community that is liked by everyone.

This is where the game differs mostly from Madrazo’s approach: it is basically a tool to create a census of everyone’s preferences. Instead of providing a player experience, the game loses its ‘gameness’ and facilitates a more complex and complete form of data gathering. Data by itself is not enough because they have to be complemented with ideas from the ground up. This is what makes this game a useful communication facilitator: it creates an organized discussion with rules adaptable from the ground up. This idea of adaptable rules was already introduced by Linda Hughes in 1983 where she observed that many games have a set of unwritten but very formative rules (1983). Other than Pedercini’s coded city system these rules are often not coded and basically refer to ‘good practice’ that makes interaction happen frictionless. Brillembourg’s game manages to bring out or at least build on these rules in the process of urban planning and densification. Following this more flexible set up the players together form a scenario that is held against ‘the system’ – a series of metrics that measure liveability. By cooperating – which in this case actually means data gathering in a more complete way – the players can try to beat the system by providing a better living situation for themselves. Solely a facilitator, these scenarios can now be submitted to the official urban planning channels – which opens up a whole new battleground, where other games might help with (such as Redesire).

Brillembourg’s approach to urban games is highly instrumental, effectively creating a better data gathering tool. During the round table discussion, a participant called Brillembourg’s game a means to make big data ‘warm’ again, meaning the addition of an emotional component. Brillembourg expressed scalability as a key factor: there is not one size that fits all but instead, by making big data warm, his game can create a localized census of desires. Hopeful for the future is Brillembourg’s conviction that with these kind of games architects and game designers can cooperate more closely by relying on data gathering techniques but also visualization and sensorial means to make the city more livable.

Conclusion – Games for Cities

The conference on Games for Cities confirmed, contextualized, and complicated the findings of the earlier games for cities events. Speculative design seems to be a prevalent aspect in many of the games, often relying on scenario prompts and visualizations. The specificity of the play setting can vary from very location dependent to basically ubiquitous. Simultaneously the particular focus of the game can also vary from player provisions to a tool to tackle a problem. Striking is that despite these possible differences, agonic elements are often left out, preferring cooperation over competition. Ludic elements are often outnumbered by free form play but ironically the rules that set up play sometimes take a long time to explain, making the break-out sessions a bit short at times.

What these analyses have shown is that games for cities are a complex amalgam of urban planning, game design, architectural, and governmental issues. The current analytical tools have to be updated and combined in order to heed Gordon’s warning of pointless game use and Pedercini’s critique of singular Simcity ideas. The entertaining values of games doesn’t have to be ignored, as Madrazo showed, for games for cities to be useful but simultaneously a more tool use, like that of Brillembourg, requires a different approach to understand. The games for cities events have suggested two variables that can help in streamlining the debates but these are just two, informed from a game studies focus (mostly). To fully explore how to fit games for cities to urban issues requires multiple metrics to test these games. Nevertheless, games for cities have awoken as a means for urban planning, trying to tame the social complex system that never sleeps.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. The Mobile City, the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University have partnered in this project, in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

———. 2016b. ‘The Good User: Tech-Mediated Citizenship in Modern American Cities’. In Companion to American Urbanism, 656. Routledge International Handbooks. New York, NY: Routledge.

Hughes, Linda. 1983. ‘Beyond the Rules of the Game: Why are Rooie Rules Nice?’ In The World of Play: Proceedings of the 7th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Anthropological Study of Play, edited by Frank E. Manning. West Point, NY: Leisure Point.

Juul, Jesper. 2013. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Playful Thinking Series. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lange, Michiel de. 2015. ‘The Playful City: Using Play and Games to Foster Citizen Participation’. In Social Technologies and Collective Intelligence, 426–34. Vilnius: Mykolas Romeris University.

How can games improve the social ties and living conditions of unaddressed audiences in Eindhoven? In a city that is increasingly relying on technology to connect to its citizens, how can those not participating in the tech-craze be reached? This particular topic shaped the talk show held during the Data Studio and Games for Cities Game Jam on the 22nd of March at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. Unlike the previous talk shows in Amsterdam and Utrecht this was more of a briefing informing the parameters of the subsequent game jam. Nevertheless, this briefing saw the clash of data deserts, preconceptions, and game parameters, resulting in new insights into games for cities.

The lectures all implicitly commented on each other, ultimately providing a critical interrogation of the meeting point of data usage, citizen preconceptions, and game parameters. This meeting point allowed for the analysis of the design of games for cities with specific attention to the reach of these games. Three essential insights coming from this analysis will be discussed:

Neighborhood initiatives are plagued by ‘data deserts’

Older adults are approached through faulty representations

The experimental, accessible, and involving nature of games makes them suited for data-gathering

While these insights relate to more general contexts, the game jam and talk show focused on the Eindhoven neighborhood of Woensel Noord, and in particular Woenselse Heide and de Tempel.

Woensel Noord

District manager Henri Koolen (pictured above) explained that the neighborhood in question lies in the north of the Dutch city of Eindhoven. During the 1960s and 70s Eindhoven experienced fast growth due to the increasing success of the Philips company, the technical university and the Defense department. Most of the expansion happened into the neighborhood of Woensel. This expansion was facilitated by Phillips, whose organization provided housing, facilities and amenities for many of its employees. As such, the neighborhood was built with a focus on labour: large roads catering to the commuting laborer, a few family institutions like schools but with most of the planning centering on housing the laborer while his/her (mostly his) shift was over. This was sufficient while Woensel Noord housed mostly employees, but this would not remain so forever.

Times change and with it ways of living and working. A major impetus for change then is that demographic changes alter the neighborhood and its function. Aging and new arrivals place the few communal facilities under pressure as life and workstyle changes. This is spurred on further through Eindhoven’s intention to become a smart city. This entails the government changing from a top down authority to a more (tech-driven) participatory society, resulting in forms of work changing and the ‘bread earner’ model of Woensel Noord becoming obsolete.

These rapid changes in the city coincide with changes through retirement. Especially urgent in this period are the older adults that make up about 22% of Woensel Noord (Eindhoven in Cijfers 2017). With their employment not taken care of anymore, this group is at risk of unemployment, low income, and loneliness. Given the functional mismatch an impending issue is that this demographic is left out of the loop. Confronted with a new government style that relies on citizen initiatives and data contributions through technology use, the older adults demographic is a group that requires extra intention in order to ‘stay connected.’

Data deserts

The functional mismatch in Woensel Noord is not only risking the quality of life of the older dults but it also thwarts the larger schemes of Eindhoven. The city is working hard to become a smart city, which means integrating technology into daily practices to make the city more efficient, sustainable, and improve information exchange between different parties, often through data gathering. But what if some of the inhabitants of this smart city do not use technology? An often heard solution is to “just join in and be smart.” Urban Futures professor Maarten Hajer characterizes smart cities understood in these terms as “a digital upgrade to increase city efficiency without much reference to equity and social justice,” further stating that this idea of the smart city is too simplistically based on “suspect assumptions about how easily the city can be tamed” (2016, 51). Hajer’s critique points to an explanation of why older adults prefer to solve problems without technology: Sometimes a problem is imagined and blown up when a more efficient or data driven tool is made (Townsend 2013, 11). The audience, especially older adults, do not always care about this new efficiency and thus opt out. The smart city pursuit is then not always in touch with the desires of the citizens, giving rise to the question who actually is smart (Hollands 2008; de Lange and de Waal 2013). For this talk show the question became how to make the (aging) residents of Woensel Noord smart?

Linda Vlassenrood of the DATAstudio, a project initiative by Het Nieuwe Instituut and the city of Eindhoven, looked at this mismatch between the problems solved through technology based on data and the actual issues that plague the inhabitants that do not use these technologies. Vlassenrood explained that the available data in general did not necessarily explain the cause of, for instance, a higher experience of loneliness or made any way to new solutions – it only showed increase age, unemployment, and newcomers. She identified certain ‘data deserts’ – gaps in the available data due to wrong gathering techniques or the inability of reaching the audience. These data deserts meant that the available data noted changes but the factors that shape these changes in the neighborhood are ignored.

Vlassenrood and the DATAstudio had set up several initiatives to traverse these deserts. An essential project was the gathering of stories. Instead of relying on the profiles of technology users the DATAstudio actually went out and spoke to the inhabitants of Woensel Noord about their worries. With the simple question of “How does it feel to live here?,” the studio gathered many emotionally laden stories that expressed an aging public confronted with rising rent, an increased feeling of loneliness due to isolation from (the participatory) society, and an unease with the high rate of change of both the populace and the society/government relations. These mixed feelings were not represented in the “hard” data, gathered through electronic data gathering and mining. Instead this new kind of data, called “soft” data, is more linked to experiences, culture, and emotions (Albino, Berardi, and Dangelico 2015, 8).

This soft data is essential in catering to the citizen needs but is disregarded. Granted, gathering this data is more difficult than gather hard data, but that shouldn’t mean that these deserts should remain untapped. A desert is still a bustling zone of life and opportunities. Using social data then becomes a key topic in reaching the citizens in this neighborhood.

Vlassenrood admits that what is necessary for social data deserts to flourish is a streamlining of the interview procedure (the data gathering) and an upscaling of the process. The streamlining desire merits experiments to diversify the standard interview techniques. This is where games can come in handy, especially when touching on the topic of loneliness.

Older Adults

From the initial soft data it became clear that Woensel Noord, currently undergoing change, has higher levels of loneliness. Whether caused by the death of aging peers, a changing housing market, or a feeling of not recognizing the place you live in anymore, the elderly living in the neighborhood seem to be struggling. Using a game to bring these elderly together to let them tell stories would then easily solve this problem, right?

Wrong. Gerontologist Eric Schoenmakers (pictured above) explained that loneliness is not solved by simply putting a person next to another. Especially elderly or, as Schoenmakers prefers, older adults are often understood in too simplistic a manner resulting in solutions to problems they don’t always want. ‘Just join and be smart’ is one of these for instance – as if older adults are constantly dredged down by inefficiencies in their life which could be solved if they only embrace the endless contacts and capacities of technology. Schoenmakers explained that older adults are often represented as frail and lonely and they should be pitied and helped. However, it turns out that older adults often belong to the happiest demographic. While biological decline may set in, social and psychological decline doesn’t have to. Instead loneliness should be approached differently. Loneliness is mostly dependent on expectations, Schoenmakers explained. It arises when the relationship that is wanted does not matches the one that is experienced. Understanding loneliness then takes a more contextualized analysis that looks at the changes occurring in the older adults’ life and what shapes their expectations, which is more networked than individualistic.

What contributes to the loneliness is that older adults are treated as if they are impotent while many are still able bodied and motivated. This isolation denies them a function in society thus abolishing all expectations. Basically, the older adults are denied agency, meaning “allow[ing] players to manage or alter the political, social, economic, or cultural structures of the … world” (Raphael et al. 2010, 212). By imposing solutions on the older adults their influence on their life is taken away. Housing is a central issue in this. When having to leave your house full of memories for a geriatric home, an important link is severed. The same goes for older adults not being able to pay for their house now that families are smaller and rents are going up. The key, Schoenmaker says, is to treat them with dignity. Instead of a priori ignoring their expectations allow older adults to strive for them themselves. That’s why Schoenmaker prefers the term ‘older adults’ instead of elderly because this makes them a gradation of functioning individuals instead of a separate category.

An exemplary approach to the older adults of Woensel Noord is provided by the Vitalis care group, as presented by Maaike Mul. Instead of organizing standard activities for older adults – labeled appropriate for that demographic like knitting, bingo, etc. – her organization focuses on what the older adults have to offer. By relying on the skills already gathered and facilitating the formation of social groups around a passion, the Vitalis care group ensures that older adults come together and integrate into a participation society. Instead of simply addressing the proximity issue of loneliness, these initiatives thrive on passions, which gives the older adults agency over their lives and allow them to manage and shape their own expectations.

As seen in the previous Games for Cities events communication between stakeholders such as the municipality, the older adults, and the game designers should be reconciled. The inclusion of soft data and the streamlining of the interviews are then structuring the game designs. Furthermore the audience must be taken into account when designing games. The more dignified approach to loneliness can be used as guideline for game designs. With these considerations in mind the role of games for cities can be discussed.

Imaginary, Socializing, Playing

The talk show showed that eliciting soft data from a data desert requires an experimental, flexible approach. Linked to Woensel Noord this approach will have to delve into expectation management to battle loneliness. Letting interviews for soft data run on their own in the form of a game can help in letting citizens voice their stories in the time of big data, according to the final speaker Ekim Tan (pictured above). But how can we understand why games are better suited for this challenge than other techniques? Michiel de Lange outlines the benefits of games in urban settings:

[G]ames may be used to engage people in the actual planning and design process itself through simulation, feedback and using outcomes in actual design” (2015, 430).This characteristic caters to the focus on citizen initiatives as expressed by Mul as well as a feeling of agency stressed by Schoenmakers. Games can then actively contribute to the functioning of the neighbourhood by appealing to its citizens – a necessity given its current functional mismatch.

“[G]ames allow people to act on a wide range of specific urban issues through role-playing, building trust, forging collaborations and tapping into crowd creativity” (ibidem). Here is where experimentation comes in. Instead of scripting encounters for older adults, a lot should be left free for them to fill in. Managing expectations in games can be done by playing out a scenario and see how it turns out. Miguel Sicart accredits play with an experimental and personal nature in general, as well as cherishing its appropriative nature (2014). According to Sicart, playing a game allows players to make the situation their own – to tell their own story and testing their own skills. These are exactly the elements Schoenmakers identified as lacking for lonely people.

“[G]ames are used to stimulate playful encounters and interactions with other people and places by stimulating serendipity and fun” (de Lange 2015, 432). Next to providing social contacts based on proximity, games are able to draw in players that usually would not engage in urban issues. Socially isolated citizens can thus be involved and granted agency again. This characteristic of urban games is especially useful when addressing older adults, who are not known as the most gameful audience. An older adult member from the audience stated that he’s not interested in more social contacts, so the social character of games does not appeal. Instead, he’s interested in higher quality meetings with his familiars, an audience specific demand games and play with their fun and serendipity can definitely be shaped after.

Given these potential qualities of games, informed by the local initiatives, the required data, and a more granular understanding of the audience, the games that would be designed for Woensel Noord can in general help battle loneliness by providing for the following characteristics:

Games provide social contact

Games can challenge expectations through experimentation and role play

Games let its players have agency which can resound in real planning

Games use older adults as a valuable resource in co-creation, thereby taking them serious

The talk show then allowed the game designers to come to grips with the themes, the audience, and their desires: loneliness, older adults, and a whole range of personal expressions.

Conclusion

There are many ways to work with the insights gathered from the talk show. These insights show in general what games can do and why they are useful, even for a non-gaming audience. But the form the games will take, what kind of data should fill up the data deserts, and how the older adults will addressed in the game is still open to the designers. A key theme to explore is the site specificity of loneliness. Will the design teams make tools to battle loneliness everywhere or should this game jam provide games fitted solely to Woensel Noord? The talk show provided the parameters and the motivation to use games, what rests is the design.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY and the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, citizenship, inclusion respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

]]>Games for Cities – The Citizen City Game Jamhttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/05/16/games-for-cities-the-citizen-city-game-jam/
Tue, 16 May 2017 18:15:10 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4904

What obstacles for game designers arise from the tension between gathering data from citizens and addressing a non-digital but spatially defined audience? This question arose during the Games for Cities game jam held on the 22nd and 23rd of march at the Designhuis in Eindhoven. A collaboration between Games for Cities, Het Nieuwe Instituut through the DATAstudio, the Municipality of Eindhoven, and the Design Academy of Eindhoven offered three groups of design specialists, inhabitants, researchers, and others that would take on a design challenge offered by the municipality.

In the north of Eindhoven is a neighborhood called Woensel Noord. Originally built in the 60s and 70s as a neighborhood to house mostly employees of the expanding Phillips business this neighborhood was shaped to accommodate car travel (to work) most of all. As time progressed Phillips and other companies moved, work patterns changed, and new inhabitants arrived and those living there grew older. The build-up of the neighborhood did not match the needs of its inhabitants anymore. Especially the boroughs Woenselse Heide and de Tempel are experiencing problems due to the older (and retiring) inhabitants feeling cut off from society, which is linked to rising levels of loneliness. The game designers were thus presented with a clear central problematic, spatial problems and a distinct audience.

The game design challenge became further complicated however. The loneliness is exacerbated due to the rapidly developing nature of the city of Eindhoven itself. Always the technical frontrunner, the city of Eindhoven has expressed a desire to become a smart city. While this can mean different things (Albino, Berardi, and Dangelico 2015), in the case of Eindhoven becoming a smart city means using sensors and registers to gather data about infrastructures and citizen actions or preferences to make the city more efficient, quicker, and democratic for its inhabitants. The gathering of data, in the shape of personal data, location patterns, and other statistical data is central here. However, in Woensel Noord the usual data gathering tools such as smartphones aren’t used that much by the inhabitants. As such, Woensel Noord is characterized as a ‘Data Desert’ – information about these inhabitants is hard to get. It is possible, but requires long and in depth interviews, something that goes against the efficient nature of smart cities. Next to this game designer Miguel Sicart expresses that “It is not enough to have access to [data] – access needs to be meaningful so that meaningful lives can be lived” (2016, 31). The game designers of the game jam were therefore tasked to standardize, streamline, humanize, and upscale the gathering of data in this neighborhood. To this end they were given a central problematic (loneliness), a spatial locale (Woensel Noord), a distinct audience (older adults) and a focus (data gathering). How can these elements be combined into games?

This report will chronicle the process, the arising obstacles and dilemmas, and a general reflection on the use of games in cities. In order to gain a better understanding of making games for cities that pursue a specific goal, the game jam is described and analyzed, introducing the following three insights:

Designing for the audience requires reflection on of stereotypes and assumptions

Thematic generalization creates tools rather than games for specific cities

The approach to ‘the city’ is formative in the game focus, the data gathered, and the audience addressed

The many shapes of the designs are used as examples to gain further insight into games for cities. The first one of such insights can be found in the earlier mentioned focus on audience, as representative for the city.

An Elderly Audience?

Woenselse Heide and de Tempel house a relatively high percentage of elderly citizens – or more correctly named: older adults. 22% of the inhabitants of the area are over 65 years old (Eindhoven in Cijfers 2017). Usually these people have lived here all their life, having many of their needs provided for by their employer. Now, more and more changes occur as well as more newcomers arrive. About 20% of the inhabitants are newcomers such as immigrants (idem). These bring with them new practices and cultural habits, adding new dynamics to the neighborhood. Estranged from their familiar patterns, the older adults feel increasingly lonely, averaging about 7.5% of the inhabitants feeling somewhat to extremely lonely in 2011 and rising steadily (MSS 2011). How can game designers appeal to this group within this particular problem through a game? Simple right? Bring the people together and loneliness is over. We don’t need a whole paragraph to explain the importance of audience.

Wrong. We do. The link between older adults and loneliness is often understood simplistically, according to Eric Schoenmakers, gerontologist from the Fontys university of applied sciences. During the game jam it became clear that solving loneliness is not as simple as just increasing the amount of social contacts. An elderly inhabitant, Fons, functioned as a useful soundboard for assumptions about older adults. He expressed a desire for a few high quality contacts instead of a large network. To battle the level of loneliness is then not simplistically solved by facilitating social contacts but instead create meaningful interactions. But what is meaningful in this case? This brought the game designers back to the earlier identified adagio of city games: the players or citizens are formative in the process and their experience realm is central.

The loneliness then stems from feeling out of touch with society due to the many changes in daily life. Helping this feeling of loneliness go away then means giving them the feeling they can still participate and are valued in today’s society. This fuzzy goal can be concretized through the concept of “ownership,” defined by Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal as “the degree to which city dwellers feel a sense of responsibility for shared issues and are taking action on these matters” (2013). This can be qualified in a continuum. However, the dimensions of the degree of ownership was understood differently by each game designer team. Characterizing the shape of the ownership resulted in some different prototypes for each of the three design teams. Fundamental for these prototypes were assumptions of how older adults ‘function.’

One group for instance started out with the idea of an Intergenerational Tinder. The point of the game was to link younger people to older adults and then let each of them introduce them to an action ‘typical’ of the other demographic. Ideally, a granny would go clubbing with the teens. This prototype would provide the players with ownership by letting them and their activities be seen by others, acknowledged as still capable, and thus create better understanding among everyone.

Another group followed Fons’ (part of the design group) idea of higher quality contact. Not feeling part of society could be countered by showing that there are more inhabitants in the society that are like them. Relying on a shared reference frame and common memories or discussion points this group appealed to the older adults, measuring ownership by determining whether players feel more support in their own position. A high level of ownership means that that their isolation is not so destitute as once thought.

While following the earlier identified and theoretically discussed (Fullerton 2014, 3) idea of starting from the audience when approaching the central problematic– loneliness due to lack of agency – these early versions confronted the designers with their own assumptions about the audience. In the intergenerational Tinder for instance, what counted as typical actions of older adults was hard to predict without falling back into the familiar knitting, and playing bingo. The other prototype had to rely on imposed shared topics of conversation, also bordering on stereotypical, such as war memories. The assumptions shaped the mechanics of many of games, resulting in assumptions pervading the whole products. Without playtests the implied player, or “the role made for the player by the game, a set of expectations that the player must fulfill,” could not be in any way better defined (Aarseth 2007, 132). What happened here? In the Overvecht game jam arguing from the audience viewpoint created a game specifically suited for the area of Overvecht. What is different here?

There are two explanations. One is that in Overvecht the experience realm of the players was defined by their needs – jobs and communal security. In Woensel Noord the games have to be designed in such a way that the players – the older adults – like them in order to ensure meaning and thereby ownership. Identifying the tastes that will make a topic meaningful, or the preferences that go into ‘typical’ actions is more difficult than determining what someone desperately needs. Without playtests the players of Woensel Noord could thus not be properly defined.

The other explanation gave further depth to this tension in ownership. Instead of characterizing the neighborhood through its inhabitants, it can be argued that the game designers approached the spatial positioning through another approach: Data Gathering.

Data Focus

Thus it was not possible within this context to properly define the implied player and loneliness proved a more networked problem. Solving the individualistic problem of loneliness through a game was impossible as this problematic is mostly related to the surrounding personal network.The designers switched their attention to filling the data desert by charting the factors that disrupt personal networks and contribute to loneliness. Focusing on the games’ deliverables created three more focused games, but simultaneously lifted the games to a new non-spatial meta level – they lost their connection to Eindhoven and older adults – by creating games for a more general ‘neighborhood.’ To understand this change an overview of the final products is needed.

De 10.000

Named after the roughly 10.000 people that live in Woenselse Heide and de Tempel, this game strives to reveal the skills and identities of the inhabitants and facilitate real life interactions and initiatives. In a fictional scenario, overnight a wall appears around Woenselse Heide and de Tempel. The inhabitants are informed about when it will disappear and some necessary supplies are dropped in. But for the time being, no one leaves or enters. This offers the players the chance to form a new society needed to survive the period. This means that certain roles must be fulfilled, skills provided, and pressures withstood. Governed from a tent with a large game board depicting the neighborhood the players must create an inventory of the skills and resources available by placing color coded LEGOs on the appropriate location on the map, thus creating a visual overview of the neighborhood.

The game is played weekly, starting from the tent. Players enter and get a name badge. On this name badge are the skills they bring to the game, grouped into several general categories like safety or farming. Next to that each player lists the skills they would like to learn during the game. Based on their skills the players are given one of the more general roles in the game and can thereby pinpoint a coloured LEGO on the board on their house. Every week is focused around a theme – a resource or problem that must be sought out in the isolated enclave. The week on politics could for instance introduce the question of the kind of governmental system. These weeks invite the players to bring along, or locate people in the neighborhood that might have the required skills to deal with these issues and either make them play along, or learn from them. This way the game will ultimately foster face to face contact and ultimately involve more and more of the resources.

The solutions made to the dilemmas offered every week are chronicled in a special newspaper. This newspaper thus offers a community product to be proud of but also works as invitation to new players – you can leave your mark on the world. It also announces the theme of the next play session and any impending natural disasters. The newspaper is then a key interface as both a physical deliverable as a rabbit hole, facilitating insight and contact in the neighborhood.

Food for Thoughts

This particular tool shows particular competence in getting players to play. An invitation for free food and showing off local cooking skills function as an excuse to play. During play inhabitants are connected to the relevant stakeholders who can gather their feedback about the neighborhood.

The game consists of three phases: invitation, eating, and playing. For the first phase six core players, (more motivated and recruited beforehand) will be sent into a local supermarket, with several tasks. Armed with a grocery list and some money, they must buy supplies for a dish. Simultaneously they must gather ten stories about the neighborhood, grouped around several topics, and invite five people to come with them to the community center for the dish and a more in depth exploration of their stories through a game. The supermarket setting makes it more likely to invite older adults due to the local community function.

The second phase takes place back at the community center. Here a volunteer cook and the core players prepare the recipe set out earlier. The invitees have the opportunity to add a recipe to the community cookbook that will inform the next sessions. Present as well is an expert of the topic of this session. Subsequently, everyone eats.

The third step evolves from the eating. The tablecloth is a map of the neighborhood with several key areas demarcated. On each plate are a differing statement and shape, such as “I feel safe here” or “Here is where I walk my dog.” The players have tokens in the shapes on the plates and in their personal color. They can now place the associated tokens on the places on the map where the statement applies to, creating an affective mapping of the neighborhood. Some places are often credited as safe, but some of the demarcated places are continuously deprived of these tokens. The local expert can take notes of the players’ explanations and inform how the places can be improved, creating a direct link between the players and the associated stakeholders. The numbers of tokens around each question are added to a score board. Each area is then scored, possibly creating a competitive element with players trying to appeal for the improvement of ‘their’ area.

Woensel Straks

This game builds on the earlier DATAstudio project of Roomsel Noord. This project drew attention to the possibility of house sharing in Woensel Noord. Many older adults live in large houses they’ve lived in with their family. With them moving out and the rents getting higher, some older adults can’t afford their houses anymore. Instead of evicting them, some rooms could be shared with entrepreneurs throughout the week. The shape of such a sharing economy however has to be made tangible and believable. Enter Woensel Straks.

Functioning as a platform with game elements this game is designed to talk about and test possible sharing scenarios. Making an imaginary scenario physical for all stakeholders can work wonders for the negotiations, and this game strives to do so through a set of toy-like models. There are three of these toys. One is shaped like a typical Woensel Noord house. However, the walls and rooms are moveable and can be restructured and filled with props to perform the scenarios. The other toys are models of the street and the direct neighborhood. These different toys then provide different scales which the sharing scenarios could influence.

The game is hosted by someone in the neighborhood, therefore already placed within a house, adding another tangible scale. Players select a sharing scenario to pitch to the others present (some of which might be the associated stakeholders). Each scenario needs a minimum of four players to go through to the next round: the pitch. Using the scale models the players visualize their ideas and do their best to communicate why and how it should be done. After a pitch, all the players vote on whether they like or dislike the scenario and they clarify their choice, giving the others a chance to try to remove the others’ doubts. This is where conflicts in expectations can be unearthed and the data deserts can be filled in – by conducting mini interviews. Ultimately, those scenarios that have gained most favor will be presented to the municipality or other executive parties. After four of these sessions a public event must show what has been achieved in the neighborhood. The game as of yet functions more as a platform instead of a game. Adding more forms of playful interactions could make this tool even more suited for local initiatives.

Thematic Generalization

These three games rely heavily on speculative design – a playing out of a certain scenario to which the formation is not decided beforehand. In a way by playing these games it is up to the players to decide how things could be. This form of design ensures a great degree of co-creation, satisfying a social and inclusive component (which is still important to battle loneliness, although not the only solution). This way the individualistic preferences and forms of ownership are inherently possible in each game, although not defined beforehand. While this is a successful way of tackling the problematic a striking realization occurred: games for cities turned into tools for issues.

The games are often setups for a certain phase of data gathering. In Food for Thought there is a playful invitation ceremony and ultimately some playful questions. In the 10.000 a narrativized diegesis gives way for an inventory of the neighborhood and in Woensel Straks a gamified voting mechanism facilitates a playful scenario roleplay. The task of gathering data is central and in this task gamification serves as a very useful means to structure this. Gamification refers to “collectively us[ing] … problem-solving skills not only to solve puzzles within a digital game but also to approach social and political issues in the real world” (Fuchs, Fizek, and Ruffino 2014, 9). The three games spice up certain daily actions, like going to the shopping mall, thinking about participating or getting to know other people, with simple game actions, such as discussing, voting, choosing and storytelling. In a way, the games themselves are more ways of gathering data through game techniques or invitations than fully fledged games – they have become tools.

This is not a bad thing. In many ways this shift has made the games very focused while still allowing for citizen additions. But this shift has paired with another one. The designers focused on gathering the data needed to resolve loneliness but did not specify loneliness anymore to older adults in Woensel Noord. They now generalized the theme of loneliness as inspiration for the game but not as its foundational goal. While the data will be useful to address the problem of loneliness, the link with Woensel Noord is severed through this shift.

The space specificity has vanished turning games for cities into tools for data. While some spatial aspects are considered – the supermarket as older adults meeting point in Food for Thoughts for instance – these games can be played anywhere, catering to a wider and more general context.

Still, the designers linked the games to the cities through several secondary products. One of them is the use of local scenarios in Woensel Straks for instance. These roleplays of these scenarios can be linked back immediately to the municipality, embedding this game firmly in the spatial location. The local newspaper of the 10.000 and the community cookbook provide a similar link to the local. As such, even though the games are not based on the specific audience profile of Woensel Noord, or its geographical build-up, these games manage to instill a feeling of ownership nonetheless.

What this shows is that games for cities can be approached from a more instrumental perspective as well. What goal these instruments pursue demands targeted design decisions which offer key cases to analyze in order to get a better understanding of the forms of city games.

Hammer meets Nail

The three designed games all have their own design specifics resulting in different strengths and applicability. This final section will look closer at how to ensure that despite generalization local elements can still inform game designs as well as what differentiating elements are most common.

When looking at how the shift from audience to data gathering the link with the location becomes secondary. Can we identify where this happens? The design considerations were conveniently outlined in a five step plan.

Define the purpose of your game

Characterize your players

Specify the dynamics and interface of your game

What datasets are required to play and design this game

What are the desired outcomes

Since there are a multitude of ways to start a design the aptness of this method will not be discussed in its entirety (Van Boeijen, Daalhuizen, Zijlstra, Van der Schoor 2013). When solely focusing on using the games for data gathering in a specific context, a critical note can be made on the positioning on point 4 – the datasets.

In this sequence the datasets is only explicitly thought about after the game has already been largely designed. The datasets are a means to incorporate spatially specific aspects into a game, or at least implement the borders of the data deserts. By focusing on the game design first, which in this case is focused on the audience (as described before), the locale specific data is only used as flavoring – it colors the general design but is not specifically focused on it. This insight illustrates that part of the localization of an instrumental game has to happen in an early state. That way the local data can support degrees of ownership through the entire game.

So to create a more spatially specific game when designing a gamified data tool can be done by changing the design order. That way Sicart’s (2016, 31) call to “make the open data about us ours; … to see the patterns in the data, the structures that we help build” is more forcefully implemented, urging the game designers to closely analyze the data and implement it, instead of again solely working with the results. How have the games from this jam dealt with this localization? The 10.000, Food for Thoughts and Woensel Straks excel at creating a safe setting, player gathering, and forming imaginaries respectively.

The 10.000 does this through an analogy. The narrative of the Wall and its associated chronicle give the players more ownership of their neighborhood. They can literally make their mark on history. De Lange explains that urban games “ allow people to act on a wide range of specific urban issues through role-playing, building trust, forging collaborations and tapping into crowd creativity” (2015, 432). This is because play manages to create an open artificial setting in which experimentation is afforded and encouraged, transcending inhibitions. More so than the other two, the 10.000 relies on a fictional narrative to augment everyday life in Woensel Noord. As such it banks more on the experimentation of identity and role playing or learning for the audience itself. While not defining the audience particularly, the pursuit of data about skills in the neighborhood then yields a game that through narrative specifically spurs players to experiment.

Food for Thoughts alternatively focuses on audience gathering. The game itself is very simplistic – answer questions and place tokens. But the whole buildup attests of a very playful attitude. Sicart defines this as “a way of engaging with particular contexts and objects that is similar to play but respects the purposes and goals of that object or context” (2014, 21). Eating some dish becomes special due to the discovery of a question. Telling stories is turned playful by using colourful tokens to spice up the neighborhood or initially even being rewarded with food. The game turns data gathering through interviews into a playful affair, spicing up storytelling at all steps of the game. This game then cleverly plays with the threshold to start playing. While not necessarily linked to Woensel Noord, its design attests of a very strong rabbit hole character – it draws people in with a simple exchange.

Finally, Woensel Straks builds on visualizing imaginaries. Sicart calls mostly for the visualization of data in order to gain a better understanding of what it means and what can be done with it (2016, 31) and Woensel Straks builds on exactly this. By using playful models – toys if you will – players manage to make whatever can be imagined representable to all. Peter Peltzer from the Urban Future studio stresses that a shared visualization through “research by design” can make future scenarios be so much more convincing (Urban Futures Studios 2017). While virtually nothing more than a story telling tool, Woensel Straks’ toys allow the players to streamline negotiations by providing common reference frames. This gives players more control over their neighborhood and ownership of their future. While also building on experimenting Woensel Straks differs from the 10.000 in that it serves as a conversation facilitator instead of an identity experiment.

What these three different experiments show is that despite their generalized approach to cities through largely thematic data gathering methods, all three have their strengths and particular uses. Even though all games gather data, the specific problem of a neighborhood has to be identified to pinpoint the most useful game. This is another argument to analyze the datasets earlier in the process.

Conclusion and Reflection

The game jam for Woensel Noord showed some skipping and flipping of game design. While the audience was defined, designing from them on out proved problematic due to assumptions. The theme as well proved difficult to address due to the individualistic nature. Instead the main goal became data gathering in the more general sense that could in a secondary step be used to address loneliness. Tension between a known audience and a desire for data resulted in a shift to generalization. The games turned into tools that could be applied anywhere, but which due to their design could be used to provide different approaches to specific problems. What this game jam has shown is that it is possible for games for cities to be determined more by their outcome – in this case data gathering – than as a particular experience for a place. A city has many different dimensions. The job of game designers can then sometimes be to simply figure out what aspect games can facilitate in larger problem solving schemes.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY and the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, citizenship, inclusion respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

Sources

Aarseth, Espen. 2007. ‘I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player’. In Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play. Tokyo, September 2007.

]]>Games for Cities – The Inclusive City Game Talk Showhttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/05/16/the-inclusive-city-game-talk-show/
Tue, 16 May 2017 17:36:33 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4896

This post will deal with The Inclusive City Game Talk Show held on the 23rd of November 2016 at Wijk & Co. in Utrecht Overvecht. Like the preceding event in Amsterdam, the talk show was moderated by Utrecht University’s Michiel de Lange and it brought together local and national experts (such as municipal workers or representatives of local initiatives) and game designers. Unlike the previous event, the focus was on localizing the more general background of creating city games for newcomers in the environment of Overvecht. The talk show took place during the game jam of Games for Cities as well, thus the evening functioned as a dialogue with local experts, an initial presentation of game ideas and a chance to comment on their design. Sketching the general background were Michelle Provoost and Nina Hälker. Finally, Ekim Tan was present to discuss the game jam game design process. Due to the more specific localization of a neighborhood (instead of the whole of Amsterdam) the focus of this talk show was on how games can be used to approach an influx of newcomers in a specific neighborhood.

This report shall discuss the ideas presented in this talk show to reflect on the role of games in dealing with an influx of newcomers. This is done by first sketching what games can achieve in general and the gradually localizing these capabilities in the context of Overvecht. This will be done by giving some background on Overvecht, chronicling Michelle Provoost’s talk on why games should be used in cities, observing examples and consequences of games in the newcomer issue as sketched by Nina Hälker, and finally reflecting on these ideas in relation to Overvecht as spurred by the dialogue between Ekim Tan and the local audience.

Why use games?

In order to gain more insight into how the particular social issue of housing and integrating newcomers can be addressed through games, the capacities of games should be outlined. This way the goals to be pursued by possible games can be demarcated. The arrival of newcomers into cities is a complex topic. Games are however not a completely random approach to such complexity. According to Michiel de Lange, games can facilitate complex urban issues in several ways.

“[G]ames may be used to engage people in the actual planning and design process itself through simulation, feedback and using outcomes in actual design” (de Lange 2015, 430).

“[G]ames allow people to act on a wide range of specific urban issues through role-playing, building trust, forging collaborations and tapping into crowd creativity” (ibidem).

“[G]ames are used to stimulate playful encounters and interactions with other people and places by stimulating serendipity and fun” (idem, 432).

“[G]ames are used to foster a “sense of place”, a feeling of belonging and care for the city through emotionally powerful play experiences” (ibidem).

Giving newcomers a voice in the actual neighbourhood design, or asking locals to help in the planning contributes to a feeling of ownership among citizens – “a sense of responsibility for shared issues and [the ability to take] action on these matters” (de Lange & de Waal 2013). Games can then prevent imposing unwanted measures that further alienate the neighbourhood from its residents. The social, experimental and emotional ties evoked through games can help tie newcomers to their new home as well as visualise the present opportunities for inhabitants. Games, as such, seem to be a very useful tool that can address nearly everyone and everything, and be meaningful to boot.

An example of such use of games can be seen in Boston, Massachusetts. The Engagement Lab @ Emerson College used a Second Life clone, Hub2, to involve citizens in the planning of a neighbourhood park. This game saw youngsters engaged with the planning process and gave the space more local meaning. As Eric Gordon and Edith Manosevitch put it: “Rather than relying on information from outside experts, [participants] were able to create and share local experiences. Experiences of the park space, not the idea of the park space, were the instigators of conversation” (2010, 89). Based on this example, games can be used to involve new people, characterise a place, inform design decisions, and foster more experimental exploration. These are all general consequences of games for cities, but how do these effects hold up when contextualised in a local environment? First, the specific environment of Utrecht’s Overvecht neighbourhood will be outlined in the following section.

Utrecht Overvecht

In the northeast of Utrecht lies the district of Overvecht. Built after the Second World War, Overvecht is one of the ten districts that comprise Utrecht. Next to bordering on large nature areas, Overvecht is the greenest district, as well as the district with the most sport facilities. However, Overvecht has a negative reputation, with residents grading it with a 5.6 (Wertwijn et al. 2016, 5). It copes with unemployment, a higher percentage of residents with declining health, youth delinquency and criminality. Many local initiatives and campaigns now focus on improving housing, employment, health and safety.

Another characterizing element of Overvecht is that it has a relatively high amount of social housing. This makes it an appealing district for newcomers to Utrecht. The many students, migrant workers, refugees, but also reintegrated delinquents flock to the many large apartment buildings of Overvecht due to its low prices. As a result, a local expert claims that in the whole of Overvecht there live about 170 different nationalities (in contrast: the whole city of London houses about 180). Overvecht is then home to a very multicultural public that is constantly coming and going. This dynamism, as well as the abovementioned problems can make it hard to feel at home in Overvecht, where despite its diverse population opportunities remain limited and social cohesion, graded with a 4.8 (Wertwijn et al. 2016, 5), is relatively low in the isolated apartment condos. As more and more newcomers – the most recent ones being refugees – come to Overvecht, the carrying capacity of the neighborhood is stretched and the inclusivity is tested, sometimes resulting in violence.

With this overview of game capacities and the application context in mind we can start to ponder on how can games even begin to help in this. The talk show highlighted two sides of this phenomenon: the possible games used to model this, and the topic of coping with newcomers. The latter was first addressed by Michelle Provoost.

Gamifiable aspects of newcomer influx

Addressing the topic of newcomer influxes, Michelle Provoost, co-author of the essay A City of Comings and Goings(Provoost & Vanstiphout 2015),explains how a city becomes an Arrival City – a city able to deal with a constant influx of newcomers. It has to develop a flexible social network that permits citizens to a) emancipate, and b) climb the social ladder. To this end, according to Provoost, cities have to account for five characteristics:

Ample supply of government owned social housing;

Flexibility of housing programs and regulations;

Awareness of the opportunities in the urban areas of newcomers;

Decentralized control;

Afford participation of the newcomers.

As illustrated in this overview, to properly address the complex topic of newcomers in contexts such as Overvecht, only one out of five of these characteristics can be approached through games. Games can help enable participation through role plays, level playing fields and experimental, safe settings. Despite these capabilities, designers must consider that games operate in a particular milieu wherein housing reigns supreme.

How can games function within this milieu in that case? A remark from the audience was enlightening in the respect. This local expert observed the focus in Provoost’s overview on housing and instead suggested a focus on homes. Having a house and feeling at home are two different things. Feeling at home happens through a social network that provides opportunities, and a general sense of meaning associated to a place. Play and games, according to Miguel Sicart can “make a space that is not supposed to be personal [into] a new environment for expression and collective and individual identity (2016, 31). Following the characteristics of play outlined by De Lange and focusing on the fostering of a social opportunity network, games can indeed help prepare the city for newcomers, but only by providing opportunities for participation that facilitate meaning making as well as interaction in the city. Games and play do not address other necessary issues like housing however..

Stretching Participation to its limits

The second speaker left the political realm of newcomers behind and instead focused on existing games that have already engaged with this issue. This gave the audience an idea of what already happens in the games for cities domain and they could probe the effects. Nina Hälker, research assistant from the Hafencity Universität in Hamburg, discussed the Hamburg initiative of FindingPlaces, a game commissioned by the Hamburg municipality. Relying on the CityScope technology, this initiative allowed citizens of Hamburg to playfully help the municipal government in identifying suitable locations for arriving refugees. Using a projection of Hamburg on Plexiglas, citizens could explore characteristics of buildings and with specialized LEGO blocks indicate suitable places. These places were then communicated to the municipality for consideration. By playing citizens could participate in the facilitation of housing newcomers. Through this system 2300 places were identified as suitable, but the municipality only accepted 44 and currently six are seriously considered (although these are currently uncertain as well for people living around the identified places protested). What this shows is that games can help in making citizens participate in urban issues but the actual results have to be nuanced.

Hälker did not abandon all hope however. While the games do not directly influence the newcomers, the game did foster new debates on parameters for refugee housing, dimensions of resistance and unfamiliarity. Summarised, it provided an overall more complex view of the city. Indirectly then, games can affect the newcomer issue, but only by fostering participation in larger debates instead of providing solutions by themselves. Games are always contextualized in multiple systems which temper their efficacy. At this point in the evening the participants were familiarized with the particulars of the newcomer issue, the reach of the efficacy of games, and some of their effects. What remained was a more dialogical reflection on the games designed to played in the context of Overvecht.

Overvecht Games

Having received these perspectives on what games can be used for and their limited reach, Ekim Tan was the last speaker of the talk show, and gathered comments, pitfalls and advice when designing games for Overvecht from the audience. Throughout the day, Tan had participated in a game jam with the sole purpose to design a game for Overvecht that would make its inhabitants – new or settled – feel at home. Tan presented the data on which she and her fellow designers based their expectations of the game. Key in these considerations was addressing what residents have to offer Overvecht and vice versa. This focus was divided into four topics that were outlined as key focal points in the acceleration plan: housing, employment, health, and safety. To give the game designers the best chance at creating a useful game the audience was asked to identify the most fruitful goal and audience to be pursued through games.

In the ensuing plenary discussion, the audience stressed that Overvecht is characterized by a large number of international residents that do not necessarily participate with initiatives because they are either unaware or lack motivation. To fully realize the participation focus, many local experts recommended that involving the playing residents in the creation of the game or in a large part of their functioning is key. Not only does this facilitate participation, it also allows citizens to experience ownership of their neighborhood through the game, which is useful for newcomers to feel at home. In order to do this however the games should not impose desired behavior on the players. Initiatives that for instance invite residents to participate in policy making only appeal to a very small portion of the citizens, mostly not the newcomers. These highly structured meetings do not fit the intended audience.

During the closing discussion local experts stressed that in order for games to appeal to citizens they need to engage with the daily experience realm of the citizens. In a neighborhood with 170 different nationalities, this may differ a lot. Therefore, the local experts suggested something in line with game design theories. Sicart calls play “appropriative” in the sense that “it wants to take over the world in order to manipulate it” (2016, 28). This means that when playing a game the exact result it has on the play session is not yet determined. Every player will manipulate the rules and the objects differently to create a situation that is personally pleasing. Keeping this in mind, the local experts suggested creating a lot of leeway in the games for citizens to add their own cultural or personal preferences. This way language, motivation, and cultural barriers are evaded and personal experiences are ensured. The focus is on player stories instead of static game structures. This personal adaptability is a key element in games for cities in Overvecht.

Conclusion

The talk show foregrounded the complex considerations that go into making a game for a localized area. The goal of this talk show was to reflect on the role of games in dealing with an influx of newcomers. The talk show foregrounded the following considerations:

Games can help foster participation

Games are embedded in an administrative and personal context

Games must appeal to the experiences of their players

Appealing to experiences can be done through (unregulated) co-creation

These points mean that games for cities have to tread a careful balance: They either strive for very specific goals or relinquish control to involve more and different publics. The next pertinent question is how to get citizens and especially newcomers to play. Addressing cross-cultural appeals such as food or sport may offer insight in this matter but regardless of these elements games for cities are the most locally specific of all games while simultaneously leaving very much to be filled in.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY and the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, citizenship, inclusion respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

]]>Games for Cities – The Inclusive City Game Jamhttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/05/16/the-inclusive-city-game-jam/
Tue, 16 May 2017 15:47:03 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4885

Map of Overvecht

How do you design useful games for a neighborhood that houses about 170 different nationalities? This question shaped The Inclusive City Game Jam held on the 23rd and 24th of November 2016 in the Stadstuin Klopvaart in the Utrecht neighborhood of Overvecht. Briefed by the municipality of Utrecht, specifically the department in charge of Overvecht and its local initiatives, three teams of two game designers (Adam van Heerden & Genevieve Korte, Ekim Tan & Nina Hälker, and Gabriele Ferri & Txell Blanco Diaz) set out to design games uniquely fitted to the needs and strengths of the Utrecht neighborhood of Overvecht. Ultimately the three teams had two days to design something that would benefit Overvecht and could be deployed by the municipality as a useful, and self running, tool for citizens to use to their benefit.

This report will focus on this two-day process in which three design teams design games for a particular location – Utrecht Overvecht. Whereas in the previous Games for Cities workshop in Amsterdam the focus of the report was on the shared decisions made by the design teams the focus of this report will be on what decisions shape the localization in Overvecht of the designed games into the context of Overvecht? Localisation of urban games can be seen as their defining characteristic – it is what makes them urban for their location awareness is specifically addressed to cities (de Souza e Silva 2009, 407). The process of localization is however often taken for granted so insight into the decisions is needed. As this report discusses the game jam process several key considerations will be discussed. During the Utrecht game jam the following formative points for urban game design were discovered:

Urban games are built partly from a network of social and physical materials

Designing for locations requires addressing the local pragmatic experience

Small differences in design can result in different uses

These insights will be discussed in this report while taking you through the formation of three games. The designer teams had to design games for Overvecht. They did not however enter completely blank. They were first familiarised with the dynamics of the neighborhood by members of the municipality.

Localised Problems and Possibilities

Members of the municipality and members of Play the City had created an inventory of possible initiatives.This gives an idea of what Overvecht is and what possibilities there are; it sets parameters on the “space of possibility” (Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 64), meaning the possible actions, meanings and relations.

One of the 10 neighborhoods of Utrecht, Overvecht was built after World War Two. It contains a lot of social housing apartments, sport facilities and nature areas. Due to this social and cheap housing and generally accessible facilities Overvecht welcomes a lot of newcomers every year. Many students, migrant workers, refugees, but also reintegrated delinquents flock to the many large apartment buildings of Overvecht due to its low prices. However, Overvecht also copes with unemployment, a higher percentage of residents with declining health, youth delinquency and criminality. Added to that, while many different nationalities and cultures live together, these negative characteristics, the isolated apartment condos, and drab buildings give Overvecht a negative and anti-social image, both in the rest of Utrecht as well as in Overvecht itself. This dynamism in inhabitants, as well as the abovementioned problems, can make it hard to feel at home in Overvecht. With a new stream of newcomers – refugees – coming to Overvecht, the municipality of Utrecht decided to cooperate with Games for Cities to address the experience and possibilities of coming to live in Overvecht.

The municipality did not come with a clear assignment or goal that had to be solved by use of a game. Instead the municipality asked for a tool they could deploy independently. The municipality wanted to know the mechanics for the following functional specifications:

Replayable

Rewarding for the inhabitants of Overvecht

More rewarding with more replays

Playable at different locations

The designer teams set out to design games that fit these characteristics and of which one of them or a combination would be a published game, to be launched in January 2017.

For this purpose the designers agreed that the purpose of the games should be to show what Overvecht can offer newcomers and what newcomers can offer Overvecht. The design team created an inventory of the available means and the current problems of Overvecht. For instance, Overvecht has the largest amount of nature out of all the districts of Utrecht and boasts about 170 different nationalities amongst its inhabitants. Simultaneously, Overvecht does not necessarily feel like home to many inhabitants, instead coming over as an affordable intermediary. Still, the Games for Cities team also gathered data on urban initiatives and actual number of skills available. To start their urban game design then, the team basically gathered ‘the materials with which to design.’

Taking a step back and analysing this process, at this point during the game jam a parallel with the earlier Amsterdam event can be identified. There the designers analysed the physical materials they had to work with first of all.This initial insight can be further worked out when looking at the Utrecht Game jam process. According to designers Youn-Kyung Lim, Erik Stolterman and Josh Tenenberg, “what determines the specifics of how to form [games] and what [they] should be composed or made out of is the materials” (2008, 14). Design guru Donald Norman also attributes the physical materials with shaping, signifying and constraining the possible action relations with the user (2013). What can be argued based on the earlier description is that in games for cities the materials obviously play a role, but that what ‘a city’ is made off is often less than physical. To effectively address urban issues through games then requires looking for the building blocks that make the city, which in Overvecht means things like crowded, isolated apartment buildings, sports, unemployment, cultural diversity, etc. A key insight that can be gathered from this first step of the game jam is that games for cities can be approached as networks of stakeholders, values, and actions.

Given this network perspective, different key values could be identified that merited gamification. Depending on the configuration of the network different games could be designed that strive to reinvigorate Overvecht in different ways. The design teams focused on the following three values.

Sharing personal stories about the neighborhood

Foregrounding the available resources (skills and demands) in Overvecht

Increasing the meaning of the spaces available

From these preliminary identifications the games had to be formed. Starting from a network of various actors in a very open context the design themes now identified addressable problems in Overvecht. However, as would become clear during the game jam, and in the following paragraph, what makes an interesting game and what is useful for a neighborhood do not necessarily coincide.

Storytelling and Pragmatism

We’ve seen the road to the foundations, materials, and goals of the games and gathered a network perspective as building blocks from that. In the next step designers would set out to design the mechanics of the games. This section will reflect on the early exploration of mechanics in a contextualized game. More specifically, this section draw attention to the pitfalls that come with finding mechanics for a context and specifically addresses the question of necessity.

To make people love Overvecht the teams needed to know what meaning they attribute to their home. Within the network perspective, meanings and relations had to be unearthed, and the designers approached this through a design method with a heavy focus on storytelling – something like gamified interviews. The goal became to use stories to turn neutral space into meaningful place. Many authors, including Michel de Certeau (1984), Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish (1999), and David Harvey (2006), explain this distinction by stating that space is the opportunity while place is the understood reality. Space is the absolute physical space within which a lot can happen but which by itself does not have any particular singular meaning. De Certeau compares this absolute space to a top down view – you can see everything but you can’t do anything (1984). Places on the other hand are seen as personalized space – the actions and stories citizens can have attached to particular locales. The designers considered Overvecht to be too much of a space for its inhabitants – an empty physical locale with no personal appeal. The goals of the game became to instill a sense of place into space – to give it the meaning of home.

But what is a home? What feelings are linked to that? Home can be seen as the space of the house – the physical building – made meaningful for its inhabitants. A place to live becomes special when enriched with stories – memories – and when it becomes a hub for social and practical relations – like a place to house friends or the alternative to work. To make inhabitants feel at home in Overvecht then means appealing to this wider network through the game.

The game designers began to approach this side of Overvecht by focusing on revealing secrets through stories. This is a tested game design method, underlying successful games such as Mafia or Werewolf (Davidof 1986) and Diplomacy (Calhamer 1959). While the three games designed for Overvecht had a different shape, all of them focused on letting players tell stories. One game focused on letting players bring objects with a story with them. By telling the stories they could reveal a part of Overvecht to the others like they had not seen it before, by for instance telling about job opportunities or places that require a certain set of skills. Another one of the games revealed secrets in the way of the local and private economy. By letting inhabitants express their needs and skills through a passport, networks of skills could be mapped, showing that Overvecht has more to offer than it would seem. Finally, the last team focused on enabling face to face interaction, thus solidifying a social network gamified through the setting up of urban events. As can be judged from these game possibilities, all design teams focused on connecting people through personal stories somehow related to a gamification of the space – be it through local objects, the inhabitants, or events set in the space.

While the games seemed interesting, a reflection on the localization – the ultimate goal of this report – is necessary. Based on the meetings with the municipality, the goal of the game jam was to create a replayable game that inhabitants would undertake on their own. While storytelling games often yield interesting games, it is unlikely that this approach will result in feeling more at home in Overvecht. This hesitation can be explained by following Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from his “A Theory of Human Motivation” (1943), which provides a means to understand human psychology (see figure below). The storytelling focus would cater to the third stratum of Love/Belonging. However, for many inhabitants in Overvecht the second stratum – Safety – in the form of job security, economic stability and its consequences are not always certain. To start telling stories when you don’t have a job yet or have to worry about getting food for a week goes against the primary motivations of the inhabitants. The insight that can be gained from this reflection is that interesting game designs in urban games may not fit the local desires, necessities or qualities of the local context.

The design teams concluded that their initial storytelling ideas ignored the specificities of the players in this specifically localized game setting. While the revealing secret approach could still prove useful, the core mechanic of storytelling had to be revised. This shows that when designing for games in urban settings, the players have to be identified on more levels than just the player experience. Instead the context of play becomes central. But how to design for that?

Networking the Skills and Needs

What do people in Overvecht really need? What secrets are still covered that should be enlightened to be of benefit to inhabitants and replayable? This section will explain the ultimate products and describe the lead-up to their formation.This description will give rise to an analysis on how different localization decisions can result in different values for a place.

With the new focus on the direct experience realm of the player, the focus was shifted from storytelling to gaining control of your life in the neighborhood – banking on the needs of the neighborhood instead of the wants. This control was linked to the idea of being able to solve problems – be it unemployment, feelings of insecurity, health, or services. The games relied on mechanics that match needs to citizen skills. This meant that basically all the games turned into skill based speed dates.

Central in these new iterations were two foundations which together grounded the games in their own personal urban context:

The games relied on the experience realm of the players

The games had a link to practical reality outside themselves

The games veered away from fuzzy territories of placemaking and meaning attribution. Instead the games embraced networking, self-presentation and concrete facilitation of cooperation. Games were now approached on their capacity to facilitate processes, like the search for jobs. Job hunt facilitations are already in abundance however. What can games add to this repertoire. When analysing the separate elements of the games it becomes clear that each game has its own form and with it their strengths. Looking closely at each games’ characteristics shows that inside each of them is an ideal functioning – the afforded actions fit the space of possibility. These games should then not be used outside of these parameters for that would over stretch their usefulness. It is within these different fits determined by different designs that the added values of games comes forward. Below is an outline of each game, every time ending in an analysis of the specific functions this game fits.

Aktiv-Echt – Gabriele Ferri & Txell Blanco Diaz

The game Aktiv-echt is designed to make players find solutions to personal problems using local resources. The game aims to stimulate residents into coming up with creative ways of tackling certain issues in their neighbourhood by realizing, offering, and deploying their skills. This could be an individual act, a collective protest, a social initiative or even the birth of an organization, giving actionable answers to complex social issues. Players submit problems they are struggling with, such as fearing walking home at night, and while playing the most relevant topics are chosen from these. At the beginning players make a skills and needs passport, chronicling their needs, such as walking accompanying, and skills, such as walking your dog at night, together with their contact information. The game is played by linking together skills and needs creatively to solve issues and rooted in personal life actions. The problem of walking home can be solved by walking together with someone walking the dog, etc. At the end of the game the contact information of those whose skills match someone’s needs is given so that actual action can be set up, but doesn’t have to be. The passports are collected and placed in a database to possibly help in future problems.

This game is easy to set up and lasts about 30 minutes, requiring about 4 to 6 players. It could be played in the elevators of the large apartment buildings of Overvecht, making it truly accessible to everyone, since these are the only really shared spaces in the buildings. The game facilitates, more so than provides, specific solutions by creating a database of social skill contacts that serves to connect the inhabitants in ways that are useful for their experience. Replaying is rewarded by basically offering a network event in which you get continuously more adequate and connected.

The fit of Akiv-Echt can be found in its format, goals, and mechanics. The format of the game is strikingly short and portable. More so than the other games, this game can be played in an elevator. The space of possibility this creates is very accessible which means that more players can be reached and thus ultimately a more detailed database is formed. Because of this format it is less likely to foster deep connections but even this is facilitated due to the exchange of info. The scenario discussions as goal keeps the game close to life collaboration and the discussion and networking mechanic build on this collaboration element. The game fits with making certain scenarios discussable and giving handles to start addressing them. The fit however ends there; the game facilitates out-of-game collaborations, it doesn’t provide solutions itself.

Discover Overvecht – Nina Hälker & Ekim Tan

The second game focused on giving players metaphorical control over their neighborhood as well as their own value for the community. Again armed with a skills and needs passport with contact data players now form teams of two. The teams act as mayors of districts of Overvecht and the individual players also play themselves as inhabitants of Overvecht characterized by their passports. The competitive goal of the game was to have the most successful and appealing district.

This success and appeal is to be gained by postulating the value of the district – identifying its needs, present skills (from the passports), and gather needed skills – and by selling your individual self as an asset to the district – in that you can use your skills to provide for the district. Proposing initiatives, attracting missing human resources and providing benefits in return will allow teams to make their district rise to the top. These scores carry over to the next session instilling a replayable competition. These mechanics allow the players to both learn to value their living environment, as well as identify its strengths and weaknesses and provide for them. Simultaneously, the players themselves will get confronted with their value in Overvecht in general. These mechanics enable this game to link to the experience realm of the players by explicitly relying on their individual values and the status of a district. It grants power on a metaphorical and literal level.

Next to that, an algorithm formed with the help of local initiatives, municipal employees and community members is used to determine what additions are deemed more valuable than others. This way the ruminations uttered by the players in their attempt to win the game session are also held against a metric that corresponds to daily life. As such, ideas, values, and skill used in the game can be just as useful outside of it.

This game fits different specifications than Aktiv-Echt. Here the mechanics provide a completely different space of possibility. The ability to role play as the mayor creates a meta possibility. The players can feel responsibility and value for their neighborhood. The same goes for yourself as player functioning as valuable resource. Selling yourself and your neighborhood becomes a procedural part of the game, allowing this game to let the players experiment with what they like about themselves and the neighborhood. It will thus rely more on reflection and performance than socialising and as such is more individualistic and reflective. Still, the algorithm gives this game a certain direction. Instead of just performing radical and funny roles the game fits with real world solutions, ensuring both self-exploration and neighborhood investment.

The Gain Board – Adam van Heerden & GenevieveKorte

The final game relied on an interesting switch. Players again made a skill passport but now these were collected and handed out anonymously and at random. The players then played as if they had the skills and needs of someone else, possibly coming up with new approaching the original owner did not consider. It could also boost self-esteem if a player imagines possible actions with the skills of their character which the original owner had long since waved away. Through this role-playing element this game further focuses on setting up initiatives and ensuring name-popularity and interest.

Players, having adopted a new role, play the game by positioning a player token next to a local initiative – already present or submitted – that fits their character and decide how to spend their time through time tokens. Each initiative needs ten tokens to take off. The game then requires bartering to get enough time investment for liked initiatives. This means interpreting and creatively deploying your skills or offers, which might redefine a character. At the end of the game the character passports are given back, possibly revealing surprising characterizations. Furthermore, each player token is connected with string to the initiatives they invest time in. This way players can leave with a physical image of how their skills and offers can be used throughout Overvecht. Offering facilitation of social initiatives, reflection on personal capacities, and generally discussing solutions to problems, this game had its real world effect in the revelations that could happen in a player.

The fit of this game is mostly determined by the role reversal and the playful character of the game. Instead of being driven by rules or heavy competition, this game works best with role play and experimentation – an inherent characteristic of play according to Miguel Sicart (2014). The game is mostly about exploration of boundaries. This higher amount of freedom makes this game more suited for the creation of deep social contact and the exploration of solutions. Instead of just networking, this game merits the exploration of the experience realm of others and safely present a solution – if it fails, it wasn’t you anyway.. The resource management as a grounding tactic contributes to this. The goal is to foster shared products, go out on a limb, try things. More so than the other games this game fits the exploration of new social contacts and solutions due to the safe veneer of role play.

Conclusion

All these games approach a game for Overvecht from a pragmatic point of view. To make a game for a specific locale then means to design for the needs of the players. This sometimes means relinquishing proven entertaining design methods and more blandly explore the network that forms the players’ lives.Depending on different design foci several strengths can be determined through a fit. While mostly facilitating existing processes, unique characteristics of games can specifically focus on singled out aspects such as networking, reflection, and socialising. What this shows about games for cities is that the experience realm can be identified in similar ways. However, how to link the game to reality – in what levels of abstraction, how co-created, and with what focus – can severely be altered through the use of different mechanics. This means that the next question to ask about games for cities will revolve around the specificity of the mechanic-function fit. How space or theme specific are games for cities? Where is the balance between a general tool and a localized game? The final event in Eindhoven offers a wonderful arena for this.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY and the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, citizenship, inclusion respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

Sources

Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

With Eric Gordon; Founding director of Engagement Lab at Emerson College & faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Goal of the workshop

Through the discussion of a number of texts and accounts of their own experiences, researchers will discuss the concept of civic media as well as appropriate research frameworks for civic media, including ‘research by design’ approaches. How can we build a research agenda that is both critical and productive?

Description of workshop theme

Digital media has significantly impacted how we participate in civic life, including how we gather together in groups, interface with public institutions, seek out information, and advocate and agitate towards social change. Institutions of all sorts are struggling to adapt to emerging digital practices, as they invent, adopt or adapt new tools, and rethink structures of participation. Community activists, civil society practitioners, policy makers and technologists are searching for viable solutions. Communities of practice have emerged around discourses such as the Smart City and Civic Tech, building tools and sourcing data to solve civic problems.

But it is necessary to question the nature of these problems, whose problems they are, and if they are, in fact, problems at all. While the shiny new app solves some problems, it surely creates others. While big data addresses some gaps in knowledge, it opens others. In this context, there is need to harness an intellectual discourse that is both critical and applied, that can create knowledge about a digitally enhanced civics, while guiding design for the creation of new approaches.

The notion of ‘civic media’ was introduced first as a design objective meant to foreground the affordances of digital technologies for citizen empowerment and community engagement, as a counterweight to claims about the negative impact of digital media on social and civic life prolific in the late 1990s and early 2000s. At the same time the term ‘civic media’ is also used analytically to emphasize the complex relationships between people, technologies, practices and the common good, moving away from a more simplistic functionalist paradigm in which civic technologies are presented as tech solutions that can be applied to various societal domains. In a civic media approach, researchers try to understand the complex ways in which communities use media and technology to achieve or strive for a common good.

Research on civic media often combines analysis of media practices with design and action research. For instance, research through design projects can be aimed at empowering local communities, or contribute to imaginations of a future society that provides civic alternatives for the neoliberal commodification and ‘smart consumer orientated services’ approach that dominates current discourse on smart cities, disruptive innovation and creative economies.

However while this approach can be promising, it also has it criticisms. Civic tech approaches have been reproached of ‘solutionism’, as well as harbouring a ‘progressive fallacy’. The latter refers to the implicit assumption that affordances of digital media for communities to self-organize will contribute to progressive goals and more democratic societies. Yet, these same affordances have also aided all kinds of exclusionary, populist and even terrorist collectives.

In this workshop, researchers on civic media will discuss their research strategies on civic media. Many working in this field see an urgency to contribute to the design of alternative media practices that work towards a common good and reinforce public values. How can we build a research agenda that is both critical and productive? What approaches of research by design have proven to be productive, and what issues are in need of further address?

Participation

In the workshop a group of about 15-25 researchers will discuss research strategies and methodologies for civic media. Eric Gordon will present a brief introduction to some of the main themes and issues, based on his current book Civic Media. Technology | Design | Practice. In addition, participants are invited to bring in and briefly present (5-10 minutes) one or more examples of civic media studies (from their own research projects or otherwise) that they would like to discuss / analyze. A number of texts from the book will be provided as a background for the discussion.

Participants can apply by sending a brief motivational email, and (if applicable) short description and problematization of 1 or 2 cases they would like to bring in / present. Applications can be sent to b.g.m.de.waal@hva.nl and will be accepted on a rolling basis.

The workshop is organized by the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Martijn de Waal, Gabriele Ferri) and the department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University (Michiel de Lange).

Contact

For questions or to participate, please email Martijn de Waal at b.g.m.de.waal@hva.nl

]]>Call for short papers: academic track “Games for Cities” conferencehttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/03/06/academic-track-games-for-cities-conference/
Mon, 06 Mar 2017 12:38:51 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4874Academic track at Games for Cities International Conference

The half-day “Games for Cities” Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for Ph.D. students to explore and develop their interdisciplinary research interests at the crossroads between game design, city-making practices, bottom-up participation, and civic media. It takes place immediately before the Games for Cities International Conference, on 20 April 2017, at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.

The Doctoral Consortium is an opportunity to present your work-in-progress research to fellow students, as well as senior researchers in the field. It is a friendly, workshop-like setting where we aim to connect you with people who might inspire your research and provide constructive feedback.

Candidates for the Doctoral Consortium are Ph.D. students (or early-career researchers) who have already decided a topic and methodology for their current research, and have made some progress, but who are not so far along that they can no longer make changes. In sum, the Doctoral Consortium is an occasion to present your in-progress work, receive friendly feedback, and be inspired by your peers from all over Europe.

To take part to the Doctoral Consortium candidates should:

Be currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program,

Submit before March 31:

a short “position paper” (PDF, 6000-characters, references excluded) that explains synthetically how your current research is related to the themes of playfulness and cities,

a brief CV (PDF, maximum 2 pages and 2 Mb, select only the most relevant information)

Accepted participants will attend the Doctoral Consortium, giving a 20-minutes presentation of their current research and providing friendly feedback to their peers. They will also receive an invitation letter to attend the Games for Cities conference, as well as a special discount on the admission ticket.

]]>Games for Cities – The Circular City Game Jamhttp://themobilecity.nl/2017/03/02/games-for-cities-the-circular-city-game-jam/
Thu, 02 Mar 2017 17:28:51 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4857How can city games staged in public spaces activate citizens around the theme of the circular economy? That was the central question explored in the Games for Cities training school and game jam that took place October 10-14 in Amsterdam. The event was organized as part of the Games for Cities project, in close cooperation with the Play & Civic Media research group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the EU COST Action TU 1306 Cyberparks.

During the event 20 students, game designers, architects and urban planners from a broad variety of countries were teamed up in five interdisciplinary groups to design games or playful installations for public space. These games were to address the needs of five existing issues or projects centered on the circular economy, introduced by local entrepreneurs and researchers from Amsterdam and Utrecht. In this article I present the initial findings, based on observations of the workshop process, the team presentations during the game jam and the final products.

Circularity in its many forms

Before we move on to the projects developed in the workshop, I will first outline the general theme for – circularity – and the specific urban issues that had to be modelled.

Following the city of Amsterdam’s desire to be one of the first circular cities the challenge of this Games for Cities game jam was the ‘circular economy.’ This concept is described by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as:

[O]ne that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles.

This is however a complex system to implement and to explain. For the game jam five local entrepreneurs embraced the simplifying capacity of games and introduced five urban issues to be communicated through games. The projects were:

1) Wastedlab – A plastic recycling initiative in Amsterdam-NoordAn existing gamified project dealing with plastic recycling in a plastic-ridden neighborhood needed a new impetus to increase its uptake and scope.

2) Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions – Prospecting the urban mines of AmsterdamMore citizens had to be made aware that buildings are full of resources such as metals that can be reused after demolition.

3) Hogeschool van Amsterdam – RE-ORGANISEAs part of a research project, the NoordOogst area required a system to promote a circular economy in organic waste disposal among the different participants.

4) The Waag Society – Air pollution in AmsterdamUsing gathered data on the air quality in Amsterdam, citizens had to be made aware of the current state of the air.

5) Utrecht University – Urban water in a changing climateWith water levels rising and shortages occurring elsewhere citizen must be alerted of his/her own role in the management of water.

Designing Games for Urban Issues – Key Considerations

All of the groups had to find out a way to use games or play to start thinking about complex urban issues, yet every group set out to tackle their problem in a different manner. At the same time we could observe some commonalities in their approaches when modelling urban issues into games. While too early to call this common language, these initial findings provide some interesting discussion points.

Problem Oriented Design

The first processual aspect of the modelling was found in the approach to the problem. Whereas for many game designers “a large part of [their] role is to keep [their] concentration focused on the player experience” (Fullerton 2008, 2), games for cities require modelling of urban issues and thus spring from a conception of the problem. All of the teams started with an interrogation of the local stakeholder to determine what exactly is the problem they want to see addressed. Sometimes the demands of the contractor were specific – raising awareness about urban mining for instance – but at other times it was more exploratory, such as looking for ways to use bountiful data on air quality.

The teams first approached the issue as a problem-solving project: they went looking for the underlying problem. The plastic recycling issue, which had as larger problem that the scope and reach needed an impetus, was boiled down to the absence of visualization of the recycling result. This provided a focus point for the designers and determined their scope. Like a project manager, the teams focused on the particular dimensions of the problems and only then would they see how games could be designed for this. This attention to underlying problems could be considered an important focus point when designing and evaluating urban games.

Location Based Gaming

Another processual aspect of the modelling was found in the reflection on the characteristics of urban issues. Since games for cities deal with, well, cities, they are linked to the space they will be played in. For each group, it was at one point pertinent to actually determine and visit the setting of their gamified solution. The relevance of the the site-specificity of urban issues can be identified in two different domains:

Demands

Being on site will familiarize you with the stakeholders directly involved. This insight can determine who your players will be or it can further define the problem. The RE-ORGANISE team for instance found out that the entrepreneurs working in the NoordOogst area have some different ideas about the circular economy than the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. This allowed them to adapt the specificity of the issue they were supposed to address.

Materiality of the supplies

Going to the locus of play will also show what you have to work with. According to designers Youn-Kyung Lim, Erik Stolterman Josh Tenenberg “what determines the specifics of how to form [games] and what [they] should be composed or made out of is the materials” (2008, 14). The elements present at the setting will limit and manifest the possible designs and interactions. The Air Quality group for instance found that on the Valkenburger- & Weesperstraat crossing – where the game would be set – the available assets were traffic lights, cars and roads, bikers and bike roads, and several open spaces in the field of vision of the bikers. Based on these materials and their associated characteristics (such as the time available in front of a traffic light, the width of the bike road, etc.) the Air Quality group went on to design a game that could be played in the time of a traffic light wait, catering to the movement of bikers over the path, with visual feedback in their field of vision. Getting a hold on the materials is then a key consideration when designing games for cities.

Stakeholders

Michiel de Lange explains that when making games for cities “a careful balance must be struck between simulating “real world” complexity and deliberate simplification (2015, 430).” The final processual practice exhibited by the teams was the communication of the issue in the game. The balance is determined by what is communicated to the player, and how.The teams’ urban issues required communicating a complex message, such as awareness of urban mining, a call to action for air quality, or responsible water use. This complexity was broken up into smaller pieces, some were left out completely, while some became the focus of the game itself. This abstraction was presented to the player. During the game jam three areas influenced this abstraction: assets, mechanics, and the nature of the message. These areas should be seen more as reflections on concrete game elements than processual practices.

Assets

The first element that materialised the modelling process of the urban issues were the assets used. The urban mining team, for instance, determined that only some aspects of urban mining reality were necessary, so some of the material reality had to be filtered. Because of that, they determined that a virtual component was required that could act as a filter, translating some dimensions of the physical reality into a virtual layer. Physical space was abstracted into a version that characterized buildings as their resources. However, the team also complicated this model by adding social value as a metric. In order to raise awareness about urban mining, the team complicated their model slightly, to embed it more in reality. Communicating an issue through a game then requires an inventory of the salient and necessary assets.

Mechanics

The second element stems from games’ characterization as interactive – the players have to actually do something. But what actions should the player be allowed to do and how do these relate to the issue? The teams all debated on what the exact goal and scope was that they tried to achieve. Depending on this goal, the mechanics – or player actions – were decided upon.

But this translation of issue-sensitive actions and player actions is not a simple thing. The Air Quality team for instance ultimately made a game where the bikers had to make a choice whether to take a stand against pollution or not. This choice was made by parking in a particular spot in front of the traffic light. One may wonder whether this abstraction of ‘taking a stand’ into ‘choosing a space’ will convey the message best. According to game designer Miguel Sicart (2008) game mechanics matching the physical actions associated with performing it can invoke a stronger emotional response. Choosing a parking spot has no link to fighting against pollution however. The designers were aware of this and contextualized the action with further visual information. The mechanics should therefore be carefully chosen to fit the goal as well as tested for their reach.

Message

Finally the modelling serves a purpose: to convey a message or actions. The shape of this message should be decided upon. All teams shied away from a prescriptive lecturing of how to engage with an issue for they feared this would incite more resistance than awareness. As a result, most of the games designed are more playful installations than actual games. Players could experiment instead of following a linearly designed lecture. As Schouten et al. (2016) explain, urban issues are large, complex systems, with a variety of dimensions and interpretations. By abstracting the message into more open ended terms, urban issue games allow for flexibility regarding the city appraisal.

The RE-ORGANISE team followed a different form of abstraction however. They distilled the model of the circular economy to a very simple model – a game where waste products had to be assigned to the proper recipient, thus forming a circle – and gradually increased the complexity of the model with each level reached in an app. This is a clear example of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2010), where game mechanics – in this case the closing of the circular economy loop – can convey an argument – an understanding of the circular economy. This argument became more complex and detailed as the player continued. The team had thus fully embraced the educational goal of their issue and translated this into an incremental learning curve through puzzle games. This shows that conveying a complex message through a game then usually takes more iterations of the message, or even an explanatory contextualization.

Final Projects

Following these considerations on the process of modelling urban issues into games as a way to start thinking about a problem the teams came up with different end products. The final product depended on the urban issue as well as the manifestation of the dimensions outlined above. From the final products, outlined below, the flexibility of the aforementioned heuristics that go into modelling urban issues into games can be discerned.

Funplastic

The plastic recycling team had to start from an existing project that already had a gamified infrastructure. The challenge for their model then came from finding a dimension of that infrastructure that might benefit from games. Their game, Funplastic, had to bring the result of the existing recycling back into the community. Through an app players can collect coins by gathering plastic waste. These coins can be spent in a virtual shared marketplace to purchase products made from the collected plastic that serve communal use. A mission system and a story line will draw players in and keep them motivated. These events are calls to action while the app is the new impetus for the existing projects. This project shows the importance of figuring out differing demands of stakeholders, especially within an already defined system.

Metal Kong

The goal of the Urban Mining game was to raise awareness about the resources that can be recycled in buildings. The designers made a 30 minute event of an Augmented Reality mobile game with players walking past buildings. MetalKong – a huge ape – is on a rampage and metal is needed to build a cage. Players have to locate buildings that hold resources and grade them on a social use scale. After finding them all they can decide to recycle them, thus destroying the building and adding to the cage. Or they retain the building for social reasons but thus risking MetalKong’s release. This game implicitly also gathers data about citizen’s reaction to urban mining. It thus uses a second step to drive home their message.

Carzilla

The Air Quality team designed a game around the material affordances of the space. On a polluted crossing bikers and car drivers compete for the safety of the city. Carzilla is forcing car drivers to pollute the city. As the bikers approach the traffic light, their bike lane alerts them of the imminent choice: do they take a stand against air pollution (group left), or don’t they (group right). Opposite of the light is a display showing Carzilla’s health. Every car passing will power him up. Every biker on the left will whittle him down. Making use of the shared materiality, this game creates an aware community in a very short time.

Contrainer

The water team had as goal to raise awareness of citizen’s responsibility for considerate water use. They relied on a physical object in the environment and experimentation to convey the message. They made a playful rain collector. Depending on the interaction with a series of levers and a swing, the water could either overflow (no action), drain (individual action), or water some flowers (collaborative action). The installation relies on facilitating debate and procedural awareness.

Food Loop

The RE-ORGANISE team had to convey the complexity of a circular economy in the NoordOogst area. They created a puzzle game wherein someone’s waste is someone else’s resource to be played on location and in an app. Connecting the right waste product to the recycler will complete levels. Each level is a more complex version of the circular economy, and therewith closer to reality. The physical formation of the loops and the incremental learning make this complex system tangible.

Conclusion

The game jam showed that several key considerations are made when modelling issues into games. While there is no coherent structure to designing games for cities, these considerations are key metrics that influence the model. Strikingly, these game design assignments are approached more as problem-solving projects than as game design challenges. Contrariwise, the evaluation criteria in the game jam (figure below) were more focused on the nature of the game, while there was no mention of the modelling of the issue.

This disjoint was not just in the evaluation. The teams included designers, but that meant they consisted of game designers, architects, urban planners, etc. Every design has a different approach to an issue and when modelling issues into a playful form that spurs thinking this will ultimately result in conflicting conceptualisations. As outlined above in the Problem Solving approach, there are conflicting ways to engage and conceptualise the issues. Although the process was rather disjointed, it was still valuable in that it provided a new abstracted view on the issues and provided key handles for the future. These heuristics may for instance help in creating a facilitating framework for bridging disciplinary differences. New evaluation criteria looking at the link between the game and the issue are a necessary future project as well as the link between practitioners. Functioning as heuristics, the dimensions outlined above can serve as handles to express and reconcile conflicting approaches.

This first game jam in the Games for Cities project did ultimately offer five initial insights into key considerations that cover games for cities:

Addressing an urban issue through a game requires a difficult balance between the two. Often the problem and approaches are clear, but how to make it playful isn’t.

Games must function in an urban context, replete with stakeholders and projects. Games can then serve to highlight unenlightened aspects of existing projects.

The urban space of play is a great source of material design. The setting provides the physical circumstances and the goal. The mission is to fit the game to the actors involved.

Games can explain complex systems in a variety of ways, ranging from filtered simplifications to incremental and procedural versions bordering on reality.

Conveying a complex message is often an iterative and sustained project.

Translating urban issues into games then rests on a new language we are still trying to learn. The future Games for Cities events can use this early vocabulary to hopefully spin some prose.

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY , the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and Utrecht University Media & Culture Studies department have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Eindhoven), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, inclusion, citizenship respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

What are the opportunities and complications of a match between city challenges and game designers? How can policy officers or ‘problem owners’ cooperate with game designers to put a specific issue, problem or contribution to a public good ‘on the map’, and in turn how can game designers best pick up these kind of requests? These were the questions on the agenda for the Games for Cities Circularity Talk Show held on October the 11th 2016 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam.

The present report will not be a chronological account of the events (for that, see the registration) but will instead offer an analysis of the matchmaking taken from the dialogue between the guests present. The main focus will therefore be the approaches followed by the participants, their expectations, and possible areas of overlap. The analysis will focus on similarities and differences, with specific attention to how these similarities and differences can result in fruitful collaboration. This analysis will be shaped by the following questions:

Why should we turn to games when addressing city challenges?

How do games function in an urban setting?

How can a cooperation between urban planners and game designers take shape?

While ultimately the insights in these questions pertains to any city challenge, during this talk show they were discussed in relation to the concept of the circular economy.

Using Games for Challenges

To understand why games might be useful to start thinking about city challenges, it pays to discuss benefits with reference to a specific challenge. For the talk show the city challenge addressed by all speakers was the circular economy. Lucy Chamberlin, from the Royal Society of Arts, introduced the topic of circularity, described by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation as:

[O]ne that is restorative and regenerative by design, and which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles.

For Chamberlin the circular economy is valuable as a means for environmental and economic benefits through the sustainable management of resources and it is here that games might contribute. The resources that have to be managed range from raw materials, to consumable products such as clothes and even complete cars. Based on a series of choices to be made by participants in the circular economy, products can be used for a longer period of time resulting in less waste and more efficient production cycles. This however requires these choices to be carefully thought out from a circular economical perspective and participants should be aware of these choices. This is where Chamberlin touched on why games and game designers should meddle with circularity as city challenge (as well as other challenges).

A famous quote by game designer Sid Meier is that games are “a series of interesting choices” (Meier in Rollings & Morris 2000, 38). But how can these choices be made interesting from a circular economical point of view. Games are carefully designed systems which, according to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2010, 53–54), manifest on a formal, experiential and cultural level. What this particular conception of games shows is that these systems, and the choices that form these systems, are assessed on several levels in their design process, often testing the many obstacles a player will encounter explicitly. Game designers then meticulously analyse the many choices the players can make that form the game system. In other words: game design offers a critical and expert perspective that boils complex systems down into a coordinated system of choices. Game design then allows for the simplified explanation of circularity and the familiarisation of the participants in this system.

This is illustrated in the RSA circularity game, to which Chamberlin contributed. The game features of a train that follows a track that confronts the players with different design possibilities. Depending on choices the players make, such as what materials to use for encountered mobile phones or what to do with a leftover couch, will determine which path the train will take. If the choices made follow a circular economy the train will ultimately continue its cycle ad infinitum – a symbol of this economy’s sustainability. If different choices are made, the train will crash, symbolising the wasteful behaviour of mankind. The game makes the concept tangible as well as presents the players with the concrete and real choices they can make.

Not just will this game design allow more participants to be familiarised with the required choices, the careful analysis of the system and the boiling down into choices makes the complex system more tenable. The design of a circular economy is then benefited by game design due to increased attention to the design of the system. Chamberlin illustrated the value of this game design aspect by stating, with reference to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, that 80% of environmental costs of whatever project are determined in the design phase. While game design cannot ensure that environmental costs will be reduced completely, the intensified attention to system design and the increased appeal to participants will definitely prove a valuable ally, according to Chamberlin.

This system value of games is however still abstract and general. To make this value of games more concrete requires looking at what the expectations from the ‘problem holders’ are with regards to the intervention of game designers.

Next to Chamberlin the talk show hosted two other ‘problem owners:’ Kasper Lange and Francesca Miazzo. Kasper Lange, from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, is involved in a project trying to recirculate water, energy and waste flows for better sustainability in several communities in Amsterdam such as NoordOogst. This community contains multiple stakeholders that have to manifest this circularity together. Kasper sees games as a means to facilitate the communication between these stakeholders, which, according to Michiel de Lange is an aspect that games can fulfill (2015, 430). Francesca Miazzo, from the Wasted project, strives to draw attention to plastic recycling and activate citizens in Amsterdam North to participate in recycling. For her, games can be a means to create rewarding experiences, by their nature as entertainment system. Implicit in these expectations by these local entrepreneurs is that games can have an educative value. Playing games could familiarize players with the content matter and the themes. These two ‘problem owners’ illustrated what Chamberlin referred to. The added value of game design is in changing the design process into a more inclusive version or add more meaning to it. Game design then impacts on the main approach to an issue, possibly influencing the environmental sustainability.

So why games should be considered for this differs per city challenge and stakeholder. The next question should then look at how games can actually make this happen. Enter the game designers.

What’s in a game?

The talk show hosted two game designers that addressed what the inherent capacities of games can and cannot contribute to urban issues. Present were Ilaria Mariani, game designer and researcher from the Polytechnics design department in Milan, and Kars Alfrink, a Dutch game designer focusing on helping people improve themselves and their environment. Mariani debunked the utopian idea that games can clearly communicate messages. While designers put messages in the game, it takes several translations to reach the players, who can still interpret the message in their own way. To Ilaria, games are more about sharing experiences, positive or negative. That doesn’t mean that games are useless for city challenges, but some critical and modest attitude should be adopted about the capabilities of games. Possibly not working as a solution to the challenge, games, for Mariani, are more capable of engaging citizen with the topic and possibly creating room for dialogue, like Kasper Lange intended.

This capacity to create shared experiences is a bit more focused in games that model urban issues. The city setting will have its effects on the shape of the game. What do games have to contend with in such a setting, according to the designers? Alfrink drew attention to the city setting as a space of opportunities. The urban setting allows for impromptu, voluntary, and shared actions. Such ‘unplanned’ games will not necessarily maintain long term engagement needed for solving a city challenge. Pop-up games do however have potential in the city. Running into a game on your way to work which isn’t usually there can incite curiosity or give you a different perspective on the city (de Lange 2015, 432). For Alfrink, pop-up games allowed him to draw attention to certain concepts, phenomena or ideas. For instance, his Camparc saw a huge inflatable ball with a camera inside bounce around a plaza. Through a VR set, citizens could see the camera’s perspective. This pop-up form of play drew attention to the pervasiveness of cameras in the city. Such pop-up games can then be used to draw attention to challenges, but won’t necessarily provide solutions by themselves.

However, Mariani introduced some explanations on how games can be used more specifically. Games, especially in cities where people are preoccupied with other things, cannot force players into specific actions. At the same time, the game designer can’t just rely on the player to start engaging with the game or installation spontaneously, for the intrinsic motivation will have to compete with daily life trends such as clocking hours. What the designer can do, according to Mariani, is focus on affordances. Design scholar Donald Norman describes affordances as “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used” (2013, 11). Depending on what it looks like, what it’s made of, and what you can do with it, certain designs will make certain actions more probable than others. A table is flat so you can put things on it, but it’s also heavy so you won’t throw it, for instance. By carefully designing how the game is shaped, what it’s made of, and how it is played, the designers can facilitate practices. This way, circular thinking can be hinted at and suggested, but the whole concept will not be conveyed that easily.

Building on these affordances, in this case the available actions, Alfrink suggested playability of daily actions. He referred to the Hubbub Ballot Bin, a dustbin for cigarette buds. This bin has two holes, each corresponding to an answer to a question above it. This simple gamification, with updatable question, has kept streets cleaner because motivation to throw away buds is higher. So what this shows is that games in cities will have to contend with daily actions. This could be a problem, but at the same time offers games existing mechanics to exploit.

The contributions from the game designers were sobering, but necessary. Games in cities, let alone games for circularity, are not as goal oriented as sometimes imagined. This doesn’t mean that games cannot be used at all. The affordances and pop-up quality can still make games draw attention to topics and motivate people to act. But a key consideration on how these games can be used is that the ‘how’ should be reconciled. The expectations of entrepreneurs should be level with the capacities of games. But what is happening to adjust these expectations? Start the Dialogue!

Shared Dialogue and Evaluation

With all cards now on the table, we can start looking at the extent of possible dialogues between ‘problem owners’ and game designers. The following section will observe several areas of overlap and look at these through the critical lens that has been gradually refined through the claims made during the talk show. The goal is to show what possibilities and pitfalls are present in the dialogue between the two parties.

At the start of the debate cooperation between entrepreneurs and game designers seemed already in existence. Alfrink and Chamberlin seemed to utilise a similar vocabulary when they both spoke of the system complexity of both games and circularity. Games, as outlined above, are complex systems operated through simplified choices. Circularity, when including all aspects (seen simplified in the figure by the Ellen MacArthur foundation below) is often also simplified to focus on one particular element, like a how the NoordOogst project focuses on waste circularity only. However, when looking more closely at their focus when they discussed systems, Alfrink and Chamberlin spoke of game and urban systems respectively. Chamberlin focused on how the RCA circularity game communicated the system of circularity, or, how the in-game choices conveyed actions to be taken to heart by the players in their daily life. For her, the focus was on communication. Alfrink instead focused on the nature of the game as a game, arguing that the RCA circularity game was more a parameter simulation wherein you can play with a system. The focus in Alfrink’s systems is on the nature of the playability or the choices, not on the meaning per se. Both of the speakers thus judged the system on a different level. The initial conclusion about an already existing vocabulary is premature. The risk of continuing talks with this vocabulary is seeming agreements, but ultimate misunderstanding.

This miscommunication of terms or expectations happened on more occasions. For urban entrepreneurs, the main goal when using games is to convey a message to the citizens/players. Again, the focus is on communication – its facilitation, its cultivation, or its functioning. Alfrink and Mariani as game designers instead focused on the player experience (a common design staple (Fullerton 2014, 2)) as the main metric to build a game around. For them, a game must first of all be playable. Your goal may be the noblest in the world, if your game is unappealing no one will engage with it. Game designers do also strive for a goal, but to them it is much more a balance that has to be struck. Circularity, instead of being analysed in its complexity, would then be distilled to a playable model. This will give precedence to some, perhaps less important, elements over others. In order to cooperate, a better streamlining of the design process should be discussed.

KasperLange foregrounded another aspect that complicates cooperation. He noted that for a game with a goal an important step is evaluation, to see whether the desired effects are met. This led Alfrink to stress that games are not quick fixes to a problem. Lange’s comment was valid in that sense, but it means that using games for problem solving requires evaluation or secondary research steps.

What these several forms of miscommunication show is that there are two gaps of interpretation holding back cooperation – a semiotic and expectation gap. The semiotic gap refers to the different interpretations of shared terms. The vocabulary of urban issue games cannot hold multiple entries for every word. What is required is a facilitation of the communication between the parties – a facilitation of the meaning. Before cooperation can be fruitful, the terms used must be scrutinised and compared.

The expectation gap stems from confusion about what games can actually do and how urban issues can best be addressed. Knowing what games are capable of can result in better fitting uses. A game suited for spurring interaction between players can then be used as a step in a larger solution, instead of functioning as the solution. Events like the talk show are thus important to attune both parties to the possibilities of cooperation. To answer the question about the possibilities of cooperation then was answered during the talk show by the event itself: game designers and ‘problem owners’ should start with shared events to coordinate expectations and vocabulary, there are regrettably no frameworks already present.

Where to?

The talk show showed that the use of games for city challenges is not a far cry. Games can have a variety of functions, ranging from facilitation of communication to creating awareness. However, the efficiency with which they can communicate complex systems such as the circular economy should be critically assessed. Games in cities can work to foster motivation due to their physical novelty, for instance through a pop-up format, and they can engage a shared community. However, what the player takes from the game cannot be determined beforehand, only facilitated through considerations of affordances. Determination of its effect must be done as a secondary step, instead of relying on the game as a tool to fix a problem with. So ultimately the evening showed that expectations need to be managed and vocabularies synchronized, but that the dialogue between the two parties is one to definitely explore further (for instance during the next Games for Cities events).

About Games for Cities

City-Gaming holds great potential in addressing 21st century issues and the Games for Cities project, an initiative by PLAY THE CITY, has set out to build an integrated community, developing a common language, and supporting newcomers. THE MOBILE CITY and the Lectorate of Play & Civic Media at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, and Utrecht University Media & Culture Studies department have partnered in this project in which researchers and designers explore the role of gaming for complex urban issues.

Games for Cities hosts three events in three cities throughout the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Eindhoven), each dealing with a different urban issue (circularity, inclusion, citizenship respectively). In each city Games for Cities will organize a City game talk show to discuss the modeling of issues into games by actors involved, and a game jam to explore the design of city games. Games for Cities will be concluded with a conference and exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut on April 20-21 2016 in Rotterdam.

]]>Games for Cities Conference. Rotterdam 20-21 April 2017http://themobilecity.nl/2017/03/01/games-for-cities-conference-rotterdam-20-21-april-2017/
Wed, 01 Mar 2017 18:07:59 +0000http://themobilecity.nl/?p=4838Join us at the Games for Cities Conference (Rotterdam, 20-21 April 2017)

Policy-makers, regulators, urban designers, smart city experts and architects will learn how city games can be used for more effective and inclusive city-making and urban planning.

Keynotes from leading ‘city-game’ design experts from around the world include: Paolo Pedercini from Molleindustria, Urban Think Tank’s Alfredo Brillembourg, Boston-based social designer Eric Gordon from Emerson’s Engagement Lab, The Why Factory’s Felix Madrazo, and Ekim Tan from Play the City.

In addition, various urban games will be on hand and ready to be played at the conference for anyone who’s interested in experiencing the fun for themselves. These break-out sessions will be run by game designers themselves who have been invited to the conference.